Fish, Visitors, and Guestbloggers

[bigscary]

bOingbOing has Charles Platt guestblogging this week. After a WalMart-fellating post earlier this week, he's decided to use the platform of bb to promote Climate Change Denialism.

That's not funny, just annoying.

What's funny is the near-perfect Cory/Xeni chain-combo (starting with this post) linking excellent Climate Change sources, empirical evidence, analysis, and more.

When I talk about Mr. Doctorow, it's often to disagree on IP issues, but I have to thank him for responding to the pests in his own yard.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

So you've joined the crowd in the terminology switchover? Seems like only yesterday it was "Global Warming"...

Anyways, the Mann 2008 report that Doctorow focuses on is thoroughly torn apart at Climate Audit (http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3967), just like the rest of Mann's work. That's a start, anyways.

Most importantly, I find the term "Global Warming Denier" or "Climate Change Denier", in conscious imitation and analogy to Holocaust deniers, incredibly offensive.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Denialism isn't only related to Shoah deniers -- it's a movement now devoted to putting heads in the sand on a variety of topics: http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/

And changing the terminology isn't some Orwellian plot, science corrects itself even in precision (consider Apatosaur for Brontosaur, DID for MPD).

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

When the change renders the term so vague as to be unfalsifiable, the "precision" undercuts the argument. When the Earth was cooling (in the 70s), we called it "global cooling". When we thought it was warming, we called it "global warming". When the Earth started cooling again (in the 2000s), we changed it to "climate change". Somehow, the cause is the same in all of these cases, and the solution is always massive worldwide government regulation. And the last version of the term is unfalsifiable--climate change is always going to happen, and we don't have a very good way of determining if it's anthropogenic or problematic.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Fine. Athropogenic Climate Change. The evidence is good that temperatures have been rising, have been rising in lockstep with emissions, that we're losing ice, and that the weather in general is becoming more erratic.

What are your thoughts on evolution, by the way?

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I believe in evolution much like I believe in the permanent obnoxiousness of smug Democrats.

Sometimes temperatures are rising, sometimes they're not; there's a lot of evidence discrediting the most "powerful" arguments for AGW/ACC. Start scrolling through climateaudit.org.

But in the meantime, first find some evidence that the sort of government regulation you want to propose will do anything to significantly help ACC. Then you can whine about Republicans not making policy based on science. Or should I start calling lefties "market deniers"?

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Turns out we can't actually do much about it, the damage is done. But maybe we can avoid becoming venus.

And there's no need to get personal. But seriously. What are your thoughts on evolution?

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Market fundamentalists don't necessarily understand their object of worship/fetishization better than those with a more nuanced approach. Almost everyone who's thought about it realizes that markets are a good way to establish relative demand and set prices, yet some seem to deny the similarly-obvious fact that extra-market forces are needed to internalize market externalities to let markets do their job -- and that some ends are worth being achieved, even if markets alone will not naturally create them under any circumstances.

As to anthropogenic climate change, do you have any links to published, peer-reviewed work demonstrating that global warming isn't happening, or am I just supposed to rely on some educated-sounding d00d-on-the-internet? Do you disagree that worldwide changes in atmospheric gases are occurring and may have unpredictable results, and that the path of caution would be to reduce those changes until the possible danger is better understood?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's a stretch to go from climate change denial to holocaust denial. Specifically, it's a stretch made entirely to be inflammatory and set people who acknowledge the science on climate change on the defense--how dare they! Puh-lease. Anyone in denial about global warming or whatever you want to call it should focus their efforts on refuting the claim with reputable, verifiable SCIENCE. They'd get a lot more respect than whining about impossibly tortured faux insults.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

If it's a stretch, it's one that was made by global warming alarmists, not skeptics. One of the earliest uses of the term was in this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/sep/21/comment.georgemonbiot) by George Monbiot:

"Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial."

Other uses of the term by alarmists with conscious analogy to Holocaust denial are found here (http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/climate-change-is-another-grim-tale-to-be-treated-with-respect/2007/07/08/1183833338608.html), here (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/323181_joel11.html), and here (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/02/09/no_change_in_political_climate/). A quote from the last of those:

"I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

The insult is bad enough, but the use of the term "denier" isn't an attempt to win the debate; it's an attempt to put global warming skepticism on par with Holocaust denial as a position that is undebatably wrong and evil. If you want to win the debate on science, stop calling your opposition "deniers"--especially the opposition who believes that whether or not AGW is actually happening, the costs of fixing it are far too high relative to the costs of climate change (such as Lomborg).

As for the reputable, verifiable SCIENCE--I posted that link. Go to climateaudit.org, and just start scrolling. That's a good starting point into the scientific fraud that Mann and his colleagues perpetrated in pursuit of raising the global warming alarm, along with many others.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You said it yourself: the term being associated with the holocausts is associated with alarmists. They're guilty of hyperbole, shame on them.

There's a great blog in the NYT, usually written by Olivia Judson, that just recently made the case that if you think of preserving the environment in terms of shares to be invested in by partners in industry, the bias of profit is in behaviors that are eco-friendly. The "costs of fixing" the problem will be repaid in long term dividends of the increased diversity and productivity of our ecosystems. The fixes aren't expensive, either, not all of them. Some, I grant you, would be a burden, but if that burden would sustain the planet more hospitably over time, that burden would be offset.

Perhaps you would be in favor of the term "climate obscurantist." What are the odds of that taking off?

In the interest of fairness, I will take a look at that website. However, I would urge you to do a search or three on PubMed. The bias of scientifically reviewed papers affirms that global warming exists and has had and will have a significant impact.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

There's a great blog in the NYT, usually written by Olivia Judson, that just recently made the case that if you think of preserving the environment in terms of shares to be invested in by partners in industry, the bias of profit is in behaviors that are eco-friendly. The "costs of fixing" the problem will be repaid in long term dividends of the increased diversity and productivity of our ecosystems. The fixes aren't expensive, either, not all of them. Some, I grant you, would be a burden, but if that burden would sustain the planet more hospitably over time, that burden would be offset.

I'd like to see a link to pick holes in it, but it depends on what you mean by eco-friendly. Preserving forests and not dumping toxic waste? Yes, that's typically in industry's best interest. But when it comes to emitting CO2, it's not even close; you can't get around emitting CO2 as a matter of conservation.

Part of the problem with global warming alarmism is that even assuming the climate models are correct (and they're not; they've never predicted correctly the data we already have), the steps needed to conserve CO2 at the level necessary to reduce the effect within a "tolerable" range are astronomically high. But the alarmists never get to that step of the analysis. And at the national level, conservation is simply not a solution; the U.S. could, through drastic and economically disastrous regulation, reduce its CO2 emissions to 1980 levels and it would do next to nothing about climate change when China and India, with a third to a half of the world's population, are going through their industrial revolutions.

I'm an agnostic on whether AGW is real or not, but there is no political solution to the problem. Neither China nor India will accept forcing their populations to remain in relative poverty to heal the planet. The U.S. and Europe alone can't do enough to solve whatever problem may exist. So when this issue moves out of the realm of science and into the realm of politics, I oppose all meaningless and costly environmental regulations that provide no benefit to the Earth.

Some of the scientists' hearts are in the right place, and they may even be right on whether AGW exists. But making policy is about more than just science.