House of Eratosthenes

Don’t you just love that headline? It’s not mine. But I’m going to steal it. I’m going to use it next time I’m the protagonist in an argument, and the thing I’m trying to support is fragile and dubious to the point of being a caricature of itself. “I don’t have a tax liability,” I will tell the tax man; and when he comes up with the fliers and circulars and other printed materials the Internal Revenue Service has printed up to handle problem cases like me, I’ll just ignore any logical points on his side and tell him “see, there you are spreading doubt.”

“God is a man and He wants you to get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” My lady might use logic to open this assertion to scrutiny, i.e., wouldn’t the Divine Being make His will better known to her, if He were to shrink my waistline instead of expanding it? Lately, I’m lacking that cosmetic “could use a sandwich” look. And if her place is in the kitchen, how come her feet can fit into shoes? “Aha,” I’ll say, “you are a doubt-spreader.”

In yesterday’s edition of Newsweek, editor Sharon Begley is exactly what she calls others. Her article, The Truth About Denial, tattles on a “well-funded machine” that is “running at full throttle — and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.”

I would have to ask which side is really pushing the throttle of a well-funded machine.

To compile an inventory of actual fact presented by Ms. Begley, and correlate it with the inventory of points she wishes to make with those facts, is to undergo a truly surreal experience. Exhibit A is the public opinion polls. By now, anybody who’s paid attention is well aware of how these work: More and more people are convinced global warming is a real problem and it’s man-made, so anybody left at the kiddie table had better get with it and hop on the bandwagon. Y’know, before it’s too late and all. But NO…that is not what Begley wants to tell us. She’s going the other way. The public opinion polls show we’ve been pretty slow to drink the Kool-aid and demand seconds, and this is evidence of the sinister workings of that well lubricated machine.

Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was “a lot” of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was “mainly caused by things people do.” In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world’s economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is “a lot of disagreement among climate scientists” on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.

Now, read that again. Two polls, or sets of polls, one year apart. Last year, 64 percent of us were skeptics. We thought there was “a lot” of disagreement among scientists. That metric has dropped from 64 to 39 in just twelve months. The point here, if I’m understanding it right, is that this evil machine is humming along as a model of efficiency because the 39 are still there.

Wow, if I were on an iron lung I really wouldn’t want a machine that works that well. In fact, when you think about this a little while longer it becomes evident that there must be another, better-funded, better-oiled, higher-performance machine at work here. I wonder when Begley will talk about that.

Oopsie, there I go spreading doubt.

Here’s something I’d like to know about the diabolical doubt-spreading machine: Why? I mean sure, you’ve got idiots like me who doubt global warming even though we’re not in a position to watch the pro-global-warming scientists compile their reports and don’t have access to the actual raw data, beyond the charts and graphs each side finds expedient to present to us. But we’re just big dummies, part of the 39% who don’t get it. We’re rats being led into the ocean by the Pied Piper of Hamlin, just doing what we’re told. What about the Piper? If you follow our food chain upward, you’re going to get to the big bosses, and I guess these are oil industry executives and the scientists they’ve bought off — people who know the planet is facing certain doom, and are fooling imbeciles like me into thinking it just isn’t so.

What’s their angle in this? They want to sell more petroleum products and increase the dollars-per-share in the corporations they manage…on a dying planet? This seems like a plan, assuming it does indeed exist somewhere, that could use a little bit more thinking-out.

But there’s more. How’s this for an eyebrow-raiser:

It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

The theme that permeates this article, and is supported in all other paragraphs, is that there really is no reason to doubt global warming aside from the sinister manipulations of public opinion that have been engineered through this doubt machine. And yet — for reasons that still aren’t quite clear to me — Begley thought it would be appropriate to toss in a humdinger of a reason, existing entirely outside that machine.

I’m sorry. I don’t wish to offend anyone. But it seems inescapable to me: if you can read about politically-motivated congressional staffers sabotaging the air conditioning system in the capitol to make the next day’s session a whole lot sweatier, just to be able to sell global warming as a public relations product — and not feel at least the stirrings of good old-fashion logically-based non-machine-inspired doubt, not even a tiny bit — you’re just nuts.

I realize people can go to great lengths to sell things to the public, and those things can still turn out to be true. But the subject under discussion is the public’s inability to decide the issue outside the realm of politics, through a sensible weighing of fact. And when you go through the pro-global-warming exhibits and start pitching out anything that’s just a lot of rhetoric, including the “Six thousand scientists ALL agree that blah blah blah,” you’re not left with a whole lot. Temperature went up about 1.5 Fahrenheit, so they say…pictures of sad-looking polar bears on the covers of magazines. That’s about it.

Contrasted with the facts about the global warming cheerleading machine: People monkeying with the air conditioning in the capitol, people writing up scary articles because it’s their job to do so. With very, very few exceptions, everyone playing this thing up has a career connected to it. And that includes Mr. Gore. It seems to be really hard to find anyone trying to “raise awareness” of global warming…who isn’t in the business of doing exactly that. Someone who’s genuinely trying to save the planet. And this kind of dovetails into that long list of things we’d be doing if the dire warnings had truth and confidence behind them.

They don’t. The dire warnings are just slogans, and it’s pretty easy to prove that they are this and nothing more.

We’re running out of time, if we procrastinate a little more it might be too late, is that it? Here’s a challenge: Try to get a global warming chicken little to stick to that theme, throughout the exploration of a plan that is supposed to fix the problem. Changing light bulbs in my house to a greener model. Mmmkay, so if I don’t do this, and soon, we’re going to cross some point of no return. If I use the new light bulbs all will be well? Or it will extend the window of opportunity to act?

What is this wonderful thing we are supposed to ultimately be doing, or getting ready to be doing, as we nibble on our fingernails wondering if we can be stirred into action quickly enough? Has anyone measured how long we have to get ‘er done? Can we see some statistics on this? Not vague stuff like “act before ten or fifteen years or it might be too late.” Specifics. Carbon tons. Saturation quotas. Dates. The global warming hype machine is demanding hefty sacrifices; it relies on these global warming climate models that the machine continues to keep telling me about, every week, every month, every year. This is what those models are for — digesting some statistics, producing others.

How come when I ask about these specifics the chicken littles keep telling me to “open such-and-such a report” or “go to such-and-such a website”? Why aren’t the specifics out there? I mean, I think that’s a reasonable question — people like Sharon Begley are concerned that the climate change denial machine is working oh, so incredibly well. This seems to me to be an opportunity to make it work not quite so well. So how come someone hasn’t already done that?

How big is Sharon Begley’s car, anyway?

You keep this up and I’m just going to have to quit blogging. You take things I’m trying to figure out a clear way to get my point across — and you just do it. Where as I continue to fumble and get distracted doing something else and eventually lose any inspirational momentum I ever had and nothing gets posted.

By the way, “SNUL” 😉

I recently read a headline (BBC, I think) that said now we are to expect significant global warming from 2009 to 2014.

See, far enough away to do something about it now, near enough to scare us into doing it pronto, and far enough away that by the time we get there there’ll be a completely new forecast and we’ll forget about this one. What do you want to bet it’ll be 2011-2016?

The period in which the AGW smoking gun is forecast keeps sliding ahead and has been since the late 1980s. Of course, all the while they keep claiming to have found it. But under scrutiny, it turns out to be bunk, scientifically speaking.
- philmon | 08/14/2007 @ 16:06
On that …

What is it in the last several years where “news” folks spend more time reporting polls on how many people think what is true or not instead of actual investigative reporting on what is actually, in fact, true?

The implication in these reports seems to be “well if most people think it’s true, then it must be!”

I’ve got one thing to say about that. “The world is flat.”

Frankly, I think it’s because “news” is more about pushing agendas then ever before, and it’s much easier to selectively report from a certain slant, then take polls that measure the effects of that kind of reporting to “prove” that that slant was true. Even though it wasn’t a slant to begin with, of course… because they are pristinely objective.
- philmon | 08/14/2007 @ 16:14

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Spreading DoubtTuesday, August 14th, 2007

Spreading Doubt
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007