Thursday, November 10, 2011

I emailed Marc Morano to post this article

Earlier this evening I emailed Marc Morano at Climate Depot to post the following article on Climate Depot:

Science controversies past and present

He won't have the GUTS to post it.

I recommended this quote from the article to him:

"Greenhouse warming today faces an even greater array of bogus counterarguments based on the uninformed interpretation of data from ice cores, erroneous views about natural carbon sources, alleged but unobserved alternative drivers of climate change, naive expectations of the time scales over which models and observations should match, and various forms of statistical chicanery and logical fallacy. Many of the arguments sound reasonable to an inexpert but intelligent layperson. Critics use the alleged flaws to attempt to discredit the entire field.

Debates between mainstream scientists and silver-tongued opponents cannot be won by the side of truth no matter how obvious the fallacies may be to an expert. Incredibly, as recently as the mid-19th century, a highly charismatic figure calling himself “Parallax” devoted two decades of his life to crisscrossing England arguing that Earth was flat. He debated legitimate astronomers—sometimes teams of them—in town-hall-type settings and wowed audiences."

So Marc Morano is nothing new. His brand of pragmatic conservatism, of calling for harassment and demonization of legitimate scientists and legitimate scientific inquiry, is typical of a pattern. A pattern of reaction to that which cannot be comprehended or accepted.



Unfortunately, the rest of us are in the boat with the knuckleheads.

2 comments:

Brian G Valentine said...

It may or may not be a surprise to you that a "climate sensitivity" is usually evaluated with the Earth as a 2-D projection upon a plane. Does a flat Earth influence the calculated value of "climate sensitivity"?

Well, yes it does, but the highest possible value is the one always used to tell people how awful the weather is (going to) get.

Asking for empirical evidence to support climate projections or which there is no current or historical evidence is not some form of "histrionics."

In fact it has been done since about the beginning of the 20th century when "AGW" became sort of a semi-popular idea.

There is a good reason why the idea languished for 60 years or more - namely, the concept was dismissed on physical grounds by people quite competent to dismiss it.

AGW took on an unfortunate Zombie-afterlife when entrepreneurs came to the conclusion that they could convert the idea to a cash cow. I don't fault these people any more than I fault mediums who convince others that they communicate with the departed

Brian G Valentine said...

Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the LORD.

- Pvb 20:10

(Proving that"denialists" are nothing more than right-wing religious zealots, right? Right)