Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
So we were sitting around the fire at the fish camp on the Colombia a few days ago, and a man said “Did you hear about the scientific study into meat preservatives?” We admitted our ignorance, and he started in. The story was like this:
“A few years ago there was a study done by some University, I can’t remember which one, but it was a major one. What they did was to examine the corpses of people who had died in Siberia, and those that had died in Washington State. Now of course the people in Siberia weren’t eating meat preservatives during their lives, and the Washington people were eating them. And when they dug up the graves and looked at the bodies, guess what they found?”
Urban Legend: The Killer In The Back Seat SOURCE
Well, by this time my Urban Legend Detector was going off so loudly that I was afraid the story teller would hear it ringing, so I just sat back to watch the denouement …
“The bodies of the Siberian people had decayed just like you’d expect … but the bodies of the people from the US were nearly perfectly intact, because of meat preservatives that they’d been eating!”
Now, as you might imagine, nothing about this story of meat preservatives is true. The preservatives are broken down in the digestive system and do nothing to preserve the human body … but not one person even questioned the story. This set me to pondering about what it is that makes for a good urban legend. Here are my conclusions.
• First, you must have some kind of lurking danger—premature death, a rat in the Kentucky Fried Chicken, a spider in a bee-hive hairdo, a killer in the back seat. It can’t be some trivial danger, either. It needs to be the loss of a kidney to organ thieves or something that big, not a hangnail.
• Next, the danger has to be avoidable by means of your own personal action. Don’t eat at KFC, don’t ingest meat preservatives, don’t wear a bee-hive hairdo for too long, look in the back seat before getting in.
• Next, there is often a strong undertone of performing a moral action. For some urban legends the moral action is the recommended avoidance action itself, like avoiding processed foods. But for all urban legends, there is an inherent and more basic moral good—the spreading of the story so that nobody else gets harmed. I mean, what could be more virtuous that seeing that your friends don’t get into trouble?
• Next, the story has to be amenable to change. Sooner or later, most urban legends wear out their impact, or people have heard it all before, or the “facts” become visibly untrue. The legends that survive do so because they shed their skins and morph into something more frightening, more dangerous, more demanding of immediate action.
• Next, it helps to have a villain—KFC, the meat-packing industry, just about any corporation, billionaires, any of those will beef up the story.
• Next, it needs impeccable but unverifiable credentials—I heard it on CNN, it was a study by a major university, three professors in Israel did research, that kind of pedigree.
• Next, details. Few people will believe a random legend that some woman somewhere stuck her hand in a pile of blankets and got snake-bit … but if the legend says “A woman in Arizona was shopping at the Phoenix Costco, and she was bitten by a brown snake that is only native to Australia” it has much more chance of being believed.
• Finally, the legend needs to be told with conviction. It won’t work if it is prefaced by “There’s some doubt about this, but …”
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So … as some have already guessed, let me compare the current climate scare to an urban legend. We have:
• Lurking Huge Danger—heat death of the planet, increased floods, increased droughts, you name it. Note how alarmists routinely exaggerate the danger, claiming a few degrees of warming is “more dangerous than terrorism” and “the biggest danger the world faces” and the like.
• Avoidable—the claim is that if we all act nobly and eschew the evil carbon, the danger can be averted.
• Moral Action—not only is cutting down on personal or national CO2 emission seen today as the ultimate statement of the high moral ground, simply spreading the message has taken on the aspects of a religious duty.
• Amenable to Change—how many times have the alarmists been shown to be wrong, only to come back with some new threat, some new danger to keep the legend alive.
• Villains—the entire fossil fuel industry, Exxon, and “deniers” are all painted as villains in this morality tale.
• Unverifiable but Prestigious Credentials—we have two stalwarts, the “97% consensus”, and “the IPCC says”. The latter one has found its way into scientific papers, where people routinely cite something totally unverifiable like “IPCC Fifth Annual Assessment Report, Susan Solomon, Editor” as a way to lay a false claim to authority.
• Bogus Details—my favorite was the claim that 37% of the species on earth would be killed by one degree of warming. See how much more believable this is than saying “if the earth warms lots of things will go extinct”?
• Conviction—man, if there is anything that most of the alarmists have an abundance of, it is the totally unshakeable conviction that not only are they right, they are so right and they are so moral that breaking the law is perfectly acceptable if it furthers their cause. And of course, they know that the legend will not work if they surround it with the usual scientific caveats, so it is told as certain impending doom.
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Now, although it may not seem so, I do have a purpose in this story. My thought is that if we can understand why the urban legend of impending Thermageddon is so popular and so hard to kill, we will understand how to fight it. So let me look at each of the components to see where the weaknesses are and how we might utilize them.
• Lurking Huge Danger—I think the best way to fight this is laughter and absurdity. For example, I have compared the possible predicted change in temperature from Obama’s climate plan to the temperature difference between your head and your feet. Ridicule is a potent weapon.
• Avoidable—we need to hammer on a couple of things. First, there is no evidence that IF the danger exists it is avoidable. Second, there is no evidence that their preferred method will avoid it. Finally, even if it could work in theory, it would be horrendously expensive.
• Moral Action—as I have pointed out repeatedly, increasing energy costs are the most regressive tax on the planet, and they hit the poor harder than anyone. This is a crucial point, because all of their flights of fancy are sustained by the illusion that they have the moral high ground … but shafting the poor as they are doing hardly meets that definition.
• Amenable to Change—we need to hold their feet to the fire regarding their BS, because they will disown it at a moment’s notice. Michael Mann’s phrase is that they’ve “moved on” … don’t let them do so without protest.
• Villains—we need to point out, over and over, that those that make life harder for the poor are the real villains in this morality tale.
• Unverifiable but Prestigious Credentials—call out bogus citations, demand names.
• Bogus Details—again, ridicule is likely our greatest weapon in this arena. The biggest opportunity for this are the endless predictions of climate refugees, sea level rises, ice-free Arctic summers, and the like. Ask to see the corpses.
• Conviction—nothing we can do about that. Peter Gleick would likely maintain his convictions even if he were actually convicted for mail fraud as he richly deserves …
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In closing, let me note that if my analysis is correct, this story of impending thermal doom CANNOT BE FOUGHT WITH SCIENCE. Why? Because it is an urban legend, not a scientific claim. As such it needs to be fought on its own ground, by attacking what actually keeps it alive … and that has very little to do with science.
My best regards to everyone, it’s a lovely afternoon, I’m going out to ride bike by Lake Tahoe.
w.
PLEASE: If you disagree with me or anyone, quote the exact words you disagree with, so we can all understand the exact nature of your objections.
Does this mean that I am going to be well preserved since I drank beer with formaldehyde in it, in my youth?
Oh, you just pointed out one more thing about urban legends. They are so stupid they are hilarious and silencing, and the person spreading them is so excited you hate to shoot the story down. So nobody challenges, nobody tut-tuts. Those who have some brain are silent in astonishment – how come somebody is so gullible to believe THAT — and those who don’t have the brain are enjoying the story and maybe spreading it.
Somebody tells a story and somebody cheers on it, and you shut up because you are a nice guy or gal.
So basically “human caused global warming” is an Urban Legend?
I think I can agree with that.
It’s “Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming” that’s the urban legend. It is getting warmer. Most folks like it warmer.
“It is getting warmer”, perhaps so, according to some very imprecise measurements.
But no honest person can tell us the CAUSE of the warming……. And how long it MIGHT last before it cools again…
Cheers, KevinK
The urban part of AGW – the heat island efffect raising temperatures – is no legend. It’s quite real!
Actually, it used to be true that human emissions of CO2 were roasting the planet into oblivion, but then, as mysteriously as it had started, the phenomenon responsible for the emissions ceased to occur.
I am speaking, of course, of my favorite and most dreaded of urban legends of yore…Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Maybe it was being caused by the ozone hole.
What is clear is that it seemed to have stopped decades ago, and we are now saved from “Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming”.
Hooray!
The end of the world is cancelled, and we can now drink and red meat ourselves into perfectly preserved oblivion until the end of time, the heat death of the Universe, or until some evil corporation hires lobbyists to ban all consumables except the Slurm high energy drink they manufacture, and we all go full idiocracy…whichever comes first.
“Fish stories” comes in all sorts and sizes! Keep fishin’!
But, but, but, whatever happened to that “100 MPG Carburetor” that GM invented and then “Big Oil” bought up all the patents for…. For the younger folks a carburetor mixed Air with “Evil Fossil Fuels” (aka EFF) so you could burn it and warm up the Earth while “burning rubber” with your hot rod. Some folks (myself included) used to “rebuild” carburetors, one of those old “sustainable” tricks from the bad old era of “Carbon Pollution”.
According to Urban Legend, all kinds of patents for exotic “game changing” technological “breakthroughs” have been bought up by EFF corporations and buried in hidden vaults under ultra stable salt dome formations in Utah never ever to be seen again.
And of course the EFF folks bought up all the patents for the 1000x better solar cells and carbon dioxide sequestration and magic 1000x “breakthrough batteries”…..
And I heard once that IBM bought up all the patents on using binary numbers so everybody else had to use “octal” numbers instead….
/sarc off
Cheers, KevinK
IBM did have their proprietary EBCDIC encoding of the alphabet and other symbols before 7- and 8-bit ASCII finally won out. Now we have 15-bit Unicode for worldwide alphabets, symbols, hieroglyphics, dingbats, etc.
Sorry, 16-bit Unicode.
+777
KevinK,
I thought all those miracle patents were bought up by JC Whitney, who would retail them under leaders like
“Increase your mileage 20%”
“burn water in your car and never need gasoline again”
“increase your mileage another 20%”
and so on.
You could get running lights and baby moon hubs to go along with the enhanced performance.
Younger folks don’t know what a hot rod is. Or a carburettor.
My local garage manager told me that his mechanics probably would not recognise a set of distributor points. However, they know all about fuel injection systems, and those are a total mystery to me. But I’m still able to change the air filter by myself.
I remember this one urban legend about the little kid in the cereal commercial:
“A few years after the original commercial appeared, an urban legend spread that the actor who had played Little Mikey had died after eating an unexpectedly lethal combination of Pop Rocks (a type of carbonated hard candy) and a carbonated soft drink, which caused his stomach to inflate with carbon dioxide. A MythBusters exploration of the legend in detail debunked the story, adding that the show had tried to contact Gilchrist, but he did not return their calls. The legend is not true; Gilchrist is a director of media sales at New York’s MSG Network.[13] The human stomach is too elastic to rupture or explode from consuming such excesses of carbonated foods or beverages.[citation needed]
Afterward
By 2012, John Gilchrist had become director of media sales for MSG Network. He has said that he has no clear memories of filming the commercial when he was age 3 1/2.”
Can you still get Pop Rocks?
“Can you still get Pop Rocks?”
Yep, sure can.
They use them to preserve bodies. I heard it in the big city!
Willis says: “My thought is that if we can understand why the urban legend of impending Thermageddon is so popular and so hard to kill, we will understand how to fight it.”
If you want an analysis other than your own, set up a contest and offer a prize.
Historically speaking, we have always been doing this sort of thing. Remember the anti-masonic political parties? The eugenics parties? I wouldn’t be surprised if Gobekli Tepe turned out to be some end-of-time cult.
I hate to point out the obvious, but all animal and plant life on this planet is “organic”, if it was any different, you’d get a noble prize for having discovered a new form of life that is not carbon based… just sayin’…
Urban legend?
That’s what they WANT you to think!
(etc)
My thought is that if we can understand why the urban legend of impending Thermageddon is so popular and so hard to kill, we will understand how to fight it.
The challenge is that it isn’t a single legend. Urban legends are for the most part a piece of cake to debunk. I once insisted on going to meet my friend’s friend’s great uncle who had the 100 MPG carburetor that GM came and confiscated off his brand new Cadillac. But when we found my friend’s friend, it wasn’t his great uncle, it was his cousin’s friend’s great uncle. So off the find the cousin, only to learn that… at some point it became obvious that we were chasing a mirage. But if I had just said that in the first place, I would have been ridiculed.
A group of my friends was recently approached by a scalawag pushing clay. It cured everything from obesity to cancer. He was getting it from the elders of various…uhm, whatever the politically correct term for indigenous peoples reserves is now. I could see some people slowly getting sucked in. There was no point arguing the science because neither he nor the people he was suckering had the background to have a science discussion. But a few stupid questions fixed it. Huh, so this remedy was known all over North America? Indeed it was. For centuries? Yes indeed! And if can even cure virus infections? Absolutely! Kills ’em dead, but big pharma is suppressing it! Huh…so why did these people let themselves get wiped out by measles and smallpox if they had such a surefire cure? Ooops, pop! goes the balloon.
The problem with the CAGW urban legend is that it is not nearly so simple. Get five believers in a room and ask them what they believe, and you will get eleven answers, some of which will be along the lines of “well I’m not sure exactly what is going to happen, but it is horrible and everyone knows that”. Before you can pop their balloon, you have to understand which balloons they actually believe in. There’s the 97% thing, the sea level rise thing, the ice caps are melting thing, the ocean acidification thing, the drought thing, the flooding thing, the desertification thing, the extinction thing, the more/bigger hurricanes thing, the general sense of doom that “everyone” knows is coming thing, and a whole host of other things.
I can destroy any of those climate urban legends things just by asking stupid questions, or insisting that we look directly at the evidence being quoted. But to convince any single person, I first have to discover what tangled up web of things they actually believe is true, and then knock them down one by one. Simply not possible in a casual conversation, and here is the worse news. If you systematically tackle all of the things that they believe in over time, they will sprout new beliefs and revert back to old ones previously debunked faster than you can get through the list.
That is why Thermageddon is so hard to kill. It grows new heads faster than you can cut the old ones off. If it had a heart, we could stick a spear in that, but it is a heartless creature that steals from the poorest and weakest while wrapped in a cloak of morality and pretends to be defending them.
Why don’t we just say, “that study’s been refuted”!
No it hasn’t!
Yes it has!
No it hasn’t!
Yes it has!
No it hasn’t!
That’s why.
That was a brilliant analysis. Well done. I hope to be not quite so pessimistic as you. But pragmatically speaking, you’ve well described the scope of the problem.
Yes indeedy.
i have argued many a warmista sympathizer to a complete standstill, only to have them forget the entire debunking a few months later during a new discussion…it was as if they had never been proved wrong and slunk off with their tail between their legs at all!
Astounding.
To know stuff…you need to be able to recall stuff.
There are actually medical uses for clay. Like CAGW and any other urban legend, there is actually a grain of truth. Shakespeare nailed it:
Alright we have a bidder for deadly nitrates and nitrates. A serious charge.
The first question to ask is whether nitrates and nitrates occur much in nature.
Does any one else think nitrates and nitrites occur in nature a lot (including vegetables), not just in trace amounts in cold cuts and in beef to keep them from turning colors?
A few more questions that come to mind– is there a global co2 cycle, a global methane cycle, a global salt/halogens cycle, and a global nitrous oxide cycle from plants?
The natural circulations of various common compounds and elements have hardly been quantified! Methane hasn’t! CO2 hasn’t! Yet we already know that despite the enormous naturally occurring sources, when any of these compounds are the result of some essential or enjoyable use to people, they trigger “tipping points in the environment,” and cause cancer.
I see a 60’s Generation scientific paradigm, and I sure do wish it was just an Urban Legend.
When you dig a little deeper, you find that almost everything we eat is carcinogenic – including “organic foods”. http://www.healthydietbase.com/6-carcinogenic-foods-that-you-eat-every-day/
Apologies – wrong link – wrong article – the one I was looking for had broccoli and cauliflower – just about every fruit and vegetable has some carcinogenic chemical in them
Belief systems are the relational databases of the brain.
Hard to construct and resistant to change.
The only way to alter a belief system is to replace an old concept with a new one.
Oh but…
What kind of bike? I recall your Australian ride, that I so envy (though I WOULD have checked tire {tyre?} pressure first). So… pedal power or petrol? Though pedal bikes can reach pretty high velocities whilst going down hill.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/videos/a30638/biker-passes-motorcycles/
How about a Truly Classic Urban Legend?
“The Vanishing Lady” has to be about the earliest example I have ever heard….
https://archive.org/download/OTRR_Escape_Singles/Escape_48-02-01_-026-_The_Vanishing_Lady_-national_broadcast-.mp3
You listen to the story, and you wonder if they hallucinated the whole sequence…!
Willis is right that AGW has many of the triats of urban legend, the trouble is when you demand refs to the alleged study and read it you find that it actually does exist and says all the crap the proponent claims.
This rather knocks the stuffing out of the ridicule tactic.
AGW is much more than just a one-off factoid, urban legend. It is firmly rooted in the believers world view.
It is much more appropriate to regard it as a religion. You will not convince a christian that God does not exist by well placed scientific arguments. It is a matter of “faith” and that is not amenable to logic.
The recently discussed C-trails is another example. It is based in world view that “they” are out to poison us and no amount of FACTS will undo that.
I recently got into this with a friend of mine. At one point she said ” you can say what you want, you will not change my mind because I KNOW it’s not normal”. Later, when I had disproved by observations and meteo data all the claims she was making and the BS she had picked up from the internet without thought or criticism, she said I was being too logical ands analytic. We should apparently rely on our intuition.
ie it’s faith based, not fact based.
LOL
“…and so I sez to her, I sez, “Ethyl, that hi-test gas sure makes my car go fast”…”
Greg, you are totally correct on the “world view” comment. After being challenged on the validity of AGW, a friend stated that he knew AGW was true because he believed that all of the evils of the present world are the result of the advance of Western Civilization throughout the world. AGW was a perfect fit into his world view. He was of European descent and a part of Western Civilization. His explanation was a perfect example of how the concept of original sin uses guilt to motivate the acceptance of beliefs.
I heard about some well preserved bodies that were dug up in Siberia. Mastodons. There were even reports of researchers trying out a 10K year old steak. Tasted so bad they didn’t have but a mouthful.
I bet they didn’t swallow that one mouthful either. Just as well since it would likely have made them very ill. There’s a lot of difference between “well preserved” and edible.
Yup, well preserved is in the eye of the beholder, and the imagination and flowery langwidge of who is doin’ the tellin’.
Here is the “incredibly well preserved” mummified dude named “Otzi”:
http://www.cristianflorea.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/otzi.jpg
And here is my idea of “well preserved”:
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/wennpic/christie-brinkley-world-smile-day-01.jpg
May have been a mammoth…
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/article/13005983/prehistoric-meat-up
Menicholas has the right idea.
The story is true. The people from Seattle had been prepped with formaldehyde.
I can guess what they found when they dug up the bodies, live relatives of the deceased looking to sue them for a million bucks!
A bit like the greenhouse effect then.
One that has caused significant damage is the anti-vaxxer messages. Daft stuff like shedding viruses, it’s better to gain your own resistance, chemicals in the vaccine cause injury etc. My friend who is an anaesthetist says he injects people IV with lots of drugs during surgery with the same preservatives as in Vaccines. He says he’s never had a patient wake up with autism yet.
Gareth claims:
“One that has caused significant damage is the anti-vaxxer messages” So I challenge what damage is significant and to whom. One of the most circular arguments that I hear is that we have to have enough vaccinations to form a herd immunity. Well if vaccines are perfectly safe and with the claimed efficacy and you and your children got em; what do you care about herd immunity it’s not doing you any good anyway. Darwin will take care of the anti-vaxxers….
Problems we face Taz are for those individuals who for reasons of being immune-compromised or too frail for other reasons to receive inoculations. Herd immunity protects them. Those people who reject immunisation and are happy to contract various diseases will spread those diseases to this vulnerable group. As you say, once the sensible ones are inoculated it does not matter to them, but we care about the vulnerable.
Well, I have to admit that’s one of the best explanations I’ve gotten. My problem is with the compulsion and one size fits all approach. Just like climate there have been shenanigans on both sides of advocacy. I lose my faith a bit when government shields the pharma companies from lawsuits. My opinion is the airline industry is much safer that would be otherwise because crashes are really expensive.
There should be a limit on liabilty lawsuits, though. Anything required and therfore widespread will draw lawsuits when there is no plausible connection, like autism and childhood vaccines. As an example of an implausible lawsuit, I have seen ads soliciting clients on a purported connection between talcum powder and ovarian cancer.
Here’s a climate related urban legend which doesn’t check out:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/09/01/green-arctic-expedition-frustrated-large-quantities-ice/
proof:
http://polarocean.co.uk/tracking/
Having to refuel after all that motoring, not very green.
http://polarocean.co.uk/tuktoyoktuk-greeted-rick-oracle-doug-big-boss/
Plenty of passages through both Northwest and Northeast so nothing so remarkable about this one. The ice is coming back sooooon …
“getting rid of our garbage” too! Wot no composting?
Here is an urban legend – the NWP is only useable today with global warming-
Amazing what you do decades ago without an ice breaker,
http://www.nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Aklavik_Nascopie_Painting.php
Daddy, why did they call it the North West Passage?
It’s a very interesting post Willis. As someone who has worked in Psychiatry for most of my working life, I see many aspects of urban myths and conspiracy theories that fall into the idea of ‘encapsulated delusional systems” This is a brief explanation. A person can be pretty well normal, apart from one area of thinking which is bizarre and has no basis in reality. Chemtrails for instance, or anti-semitism or the government invents diseases like Ebola. These problems are usually harmless and can be put down to being eccentric, unless, (and this is the critical point), unless they act on the delusions. Then it has the potential to cause serious problems.
A case I recall from many years ago was a man who thought the Chinese army were invading the UK through tunnels from China the cellars of Chinese restaurants. Otherwise he was completely normal in thought and behaviour. However, one night he was arrested for throwing bricks through the windows of the restaurants to scare away the invaders. At that point action was taken. He has acted on his delusions.
You can never tackle such beliefs through logic, because they are not part of the logical world. Once someone has gone down the rabbit hole, it can be very difficult to pull them out because they are no longer completely part of your world.
So essentially, illogical thinking does no harm, as long as you don’t let it govern your life. Or as peppermint Patty said, believe what you like, but eat a good breakfast.
Good bullet points Willis, though I thoroughly disagree with your closing note:
“this story of impending thermal doom CANNOT BE FOUGHT WITH SCIENCE.”
I took his point well. This CAGW urban legend is a political movement. It hinges upon duping a majority, who don’t understand the science, into turning to their Governments for salvation. Once control has been passed all the real science in the world will not reverse the damage done.
Consider that the current “peer review” process demonstrates the Governments ability to control the story. Massively funding an urban legend gives it authority for the 97% who don’t understand the science. You have to enlightened the great unwashed masses using the same tactics deployed to deceive. They cannot differentiate real science from urban legend.
I took it as that he cannot fight it with science, as he hasn’t got any that explain the changes, it seems to be all about how the climate doesn’t change much.
ulriclyons September 4, 2016 at 6:40 pm
Sorry for the lack of clarity, Ulric. What I meant was that the basis of most people’s belief in the urban legend of climate is NOT science. Their belief is based on the things that make other urban legends survive—the moral aspect, the pleasurable frisson of the fear of something going wrong in the future, the identification of villains to blame … those kinds of things.
And since their belief is NOT based on science, it cannot be fought with science. It has to be fought on moral grounds, or personal grounds, anything but science …
As to science that “explains the changes”, when I started studying climate the thing that amazed me was not a half-degree temperature change in a century … it was that it ONLY changed half a degree in a century. So while people have been driving themselves crazy trying to explain the changes, I have focused on explaining the lack of change.
However, since nobody can explain why we went into the Roman warm period, or why we cooled after that, or why the world warmed again in Medieval times, or why it cooled into the Little Ice Age, or why it came out of the LIA and has warmed for the last three centuries at something like a half degree per century … well, I’d say nobody has any science that explains the changes.
w.
” the pleasurable frisson of the fear of something going wrong in the future”
I would have thought that the fear is the painful part, and their hubris is the pleasure principle. Not easy to break such an addictive cycle.
“And since their belief is NOT based on science, it cannot be fought with science. It has to be fought on moral grounds, or personal grounds, anything but science … ”
Can one actually win such a moral or personal fight against a solipsistic insular bigot? Good luck with that.
“So while people have been driving themselves crazy trying to explain the changes..”
Very likely while they assume natural variability to be internal.
“I have focused on explaining the lack of change”
Which provides no help in separating the natural and human caused components of the recent observed warming. But nonetheless very useful in allaying fears of potential runaway warming.
“..well, I’d say nobody has any science that explains the changes.”
Dis you ever acknowledge that the coldest periods on CET are all during solar minima? No I don’t think you did. Any comment on the strong association between the AMO and sunspot cycles?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/esrl-amo/from:1880/mean:13/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/normalise
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-37265541
The USA has ratified the Paris climate treaty. Did I miss the senate giving him approval or is this the beginning of an urban legend.
No it hasn’t. The Paris Accord is not a treaty, it’s simply an agreement. There is nothing to ratify. Obama’s consensus on it is as meaningful as his promise to lower the seas. Non-binding on anybody.
Maybe it is just an urban legend that Obama needs the Senate to ratify a treaty.
Paul , You may be quite correct in your comments about the nature of this agreement, but mwhite also has a good point . The BBC , certainly in today’s midday news on Radio4. If I heard correctly they claimed that this is indeed the long hoped for ratification of Paris .
According to the report by Harrabin ,the climate affairs journalist , Obama persuaded an initially reluctant China to join him in ratification and that this will make it almost impossible for any other nation not to do likewise.
So no qualifications about China “reviewing and ratifying” , no comments about China’s freedom to continue its emissions , no doubts about the legality of the Obama statement , only claims that solar and windpower are rapidly dropping in cost ( no mention of intermittency) with a final comment that therefore this makes it possible to avoid a thermal catastrophe of , not , 1.5C , not 2C , but 3C in the next few years . No suggestion as to where the 3C came from .
Like it or not , the BBC has a considerable audience , not only in the UK but worldwide.
The advertising industry works in a similar way, a company finds some minor body ailment and then says if you don’t use this product , aided by a good advertising company, you will be doomed.
Yeah, I recently saw a sign on a pepperoni display that announced to everyone that pepperoni was “gluten free”. And, on the packaging, Twizzlers state that they are a “fat free” food. Buzz words are great for sales.
I have read all of the urban legend books by this guy.
The first tip off is usually the story is being told by “a friend of a friend…….”
https://www.amazon.com/Train-Other-Lusty-Urban-Legends/dp/0393312089