Arguing With Fundamentalists
By Mitch Berg
The “progressive” belief that human activity is, by itself, warming the planet is on par with the fundamentalist Christian belief that the early is 6,000-odd years old; the evidence is decidedly shaky, but it’s hard to argue with them about it, due to their tendency to call you ugly names when you disagree.
Fred Hiatt of the WaPo – published in the Strib, naturally – asks “How does one have discourse with deniers?”
The answer for normal people is “civilly”.
The climate-change denialism is a newer part of the catechism.
Just a few years ago, leading Republicans — John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty among them — not only accepted global warming as real but supported some kind of market-based mechanism to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels.
Now polls show declining numbers of Republicans believing in climate change, and a minority of those believing humans are at fault, so the candidates are scrambling to disavow their past positions.
Call it “growing in office”.
Palin, who as Alaska governor supported efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, in 2009 wrote in the Washington Post, “But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes.”
Pawlenty similarly acknowledged on “Meet the Press” last year that “the climate is changing,” but added that “the more interesting question is how much of that is man-made versus natural causes.”
When I asked last week how Pawlenty would answer that “interesting question,” his spokesman responded by e-mail: “We don’t know the cause of climate change.”
Of course, we don’t go to politicians for answers to complex scientific questions.
Any more than you should go to agenda-driven journalists:
Climate science is complex, and much remains to be learned. But if you asked 1,000 scientists, 998 of them would say that climate change is real and that human activity — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is a significant contributor.
The idea that “two out of a thousand scientists” “deny” global warming in the same sense that “evolution is just a theory, meaning it’s not real!”.
It’s just those pesky agnostics, to Hiatt:
As the polls on climate change shift, he talks about green jobs and energy independence instead of global warming, as if there’s nothing out there but pain-free, win-win solutions.
To say that Republican irresponsibility makes it more difficult for Democrats to speak honestly is not an excuse. But it is a partial explanation.
If you change a few words, it’s a bit like reading Jimmy Swaggart.
April 25th, 2011 at 7:10 am
To answer Fred’s question, I think the first thing he needs to do is stop calling skeptics “deniers”. It speaks volumes about the unenlightened rigidity of his own beliefs.
April 25th, 2011 at 7:31 am
Iran has the bomb and they’re worried about our carbon footprint. It’s why I go to church on Sunday.
April 25th, 2011 at 8:33 am
But but but but in the words of DG “the science is settled.”
It is, just like the luminiferous aether and phlogiston and just as believable.
April 25th, 2011 at 8:46 am
The real problem is the MMGW acolytes can’t sell their theory. Who are you going to believe, them or your own eyes? When they first rolled this fraud out, we were all going to be dead by the year 2000.
Paul Erlich tried a different tack in The Population Bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
And when we didn’t all starve to death 30 years ago his response was “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future”.
These people are impervious to rational thought.
April 25th, 2011 at 9:17 am
climate change is real and that human activity — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is a significant contributor
Scientific proof? What scientific proof? We don’t need no scientific proof! Submit or Die of rising oceans and scorched earth! Ohh… Nevermind.
April 25th, 2011 at 9:36 am
“Significant” is a sciencey term that covers a wide variety of formula and conclusion. It’s very easy to quantify when you have a government grant.
April 25th, 2011 at 9:54 am
I could live with reasonable reductions (or should we say reductions in the rate of increase) of fossils fuels. The less we use of those things, the more we will have, the cheaper oil, coal etc will be.
But the warmers are just to wacky for me. They are so over the top that it hurts their cause. Kind of like PETA.
Like back in early January. We already had a unusually cold and snowy winter, and a guy I know who is a believer, said: “Get used to this. With global warming every winter will be like this”.
Yes, with a straight face he said global warming brings colder temperatures and snow. And that is the problem. Warm rainy winter? Global warming! Cold snowy winter? Global warming|! Too many hurricanes? Global warming! Too few hurricanes (so we have a draught in the SE)? Global warming! Lake too high? Lake too low? Trees growing faster? Trees growning slower? All due to global warming.
The solution? Why gov’t control! The same solution they gave us for global cooling and to fix that whole in the ozone layer.
April 25th, 2011 at 9:59 am
I am a huge Twins fan, but have to call them on this one. They celebrated earth day this past weekend.
If they really cared about Mother Earth, they would have their players travel on commercial airlines instead of chartering an earth-destroying jet. And they would take a bus to Milwaukee and Chicago. The carbon footprint for a 300 mile charter jet flight to Milwaukee is larger than that of Algore’s yacht.
April 25th, 2011 at 10:04 am
Hiatt’s piece annoyed me to the point where I prepared my own fisking:
“The Republican self-deception that draws the most attention is the refusal to believe that President Obama is American-born.”
[The Democrat self-deception that never draws any attention is the belief that the US government knew before the Iraq invasiion that the WMDs didn’t exist.]
“But there are Republican doctrinal fantasies that may be more dangerous: the conviction that taxes can always go down but never up, for example, and the gathering consensus among Republican leaders that human-caused climate change does not exist.”
[Hiatt doesn’t give a source for this assertion.Interesting how he rhetorically links the tax statement with a “consensus” of Republican “leaders, as if he found them in the same document.]
“But by refusing to acknowledge that revenue will ever have to rise, even as society ages, he ends up, as the Congressional Budget Office noted (though not in so many words), in fiscal never-never land.”
[Hiatt is confusing tax rates with tax revenue. The fact is that tax revenue has over time, been linked more with GDP, than marginal tax rates. Even in the days of 70% marginal rates this was true.]
“In Ryan’s vision, all federal spending other than Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest payments will decline from 12 percent of the national economy (GDP) in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 to 3.5 percent in 2050.”
[Hiatt doesn’t want to look at the increase in government spending proposed by the Obama administration. He’d rather quibble that reducing spending to the levels proposed by Ryan is difficult. So, therefore we should INCREASE spending? This is illogical.]
“The climate-change denialism is a newer part of the catechism.”
[This is a jump shift. We were debating the budget and now he brings in climate change? I looked at Rep. Ryan’s proposal and didn’t come across a reference to climate change anywhere.]
“Climate science is complex, and much remains to be learned. But if you asked 1,000 scientists, 998 of them would say that climate change is real and that human activity — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is a significant contributor.”
[Interesting statistic. I wonder where he found it? What kind of scientist? Are we talking meterology? An honest scientist would say that a model that failed to predict the global temperature flattening for the past 10 years can’t be trusted enough to upend the world economy with Draconian carbon reductions.]
“Democrats aren’t honest in these areas, either. Obama does a good job of explaining how the Bush tax cuts helped cause today’s deficit, but then pretends that reinstating taxes on the rich alone can fix most of the problem.
As the polls on climate change shift, he talks about green jobs and energy independence instead of global warming, as if there’s nothing out there but pain-free, win-win solutions.”
[I’m in partial agreement on this one.Obama and the rest of his party don’t have the stomach to propose anything remotely close to what it will take to rein in runaway spending and debt. They prefer to demagogue it. Unfortunately, Hiatt engages in demagoguing of his own.]
“And while Obama may wish the climate-change conversation would go away between now and 2012, he at least is not pretending the phenomenon is fiction.”
[What he is pretending is that increased deficit spending and raising tax rates will do anything but make the economy continue to struggle and that demonizing Bush will win him the election in 2012.]
“As recently as 2008 [Pawlenty] was supporting congressional action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. I do not believe that he believes those 998 scientists are wrong.”
[How else would you explain his shift? There is nothing ignoble about admitting you were fed a line of bull by people you trusted.]
“Which leads to another question: Should we feel better if a possible future president is not ignorant about the preeminent environmental danger facing our planet, but only calculating or cowardly?”
[The two possibilities are NOT mutually exclusive. One need look no farther than Barack Obama to realize that.]
April 25th, 2011 at 10:28 am
Yes, with a straight face he said global warming brings colder temperatures and snow.
Our friend Doggie said essentially the same thing in this very venue. It’s called a “talking point”. Very sciencey.
April 25th, 2011 at 11:14 am
There is no inflation Winston.
Commodity price increase or decrease for the year.
CornAs of Apr 25 2011 17:49 BST.
+113.69%
WheatAs of Apr 25 2011 17:50 BST.
+67.80%
SoybeansAs of Apr 25 2011 17:49 BST.
+38.78%
Soybean MealAs of Apr 25 2011 17:49 BST.
+22.44%
CocoaAs of Apr 21 2011 16:49 BST.
-16.38%
Coffee (Robusta)As of Apr 21 2011 17:29 BST.
+85.66%
Coffee (Arabica)As of Apr 25 2011 17:06 BST.
+118.41%
White SugarAs of Apr 21 2011 17:29 BST.
+30.70%
SugarAs of Apr 25 2011 17:30 BST.
+58.95%
CottonAs of Apr 25 2011 17:28 BST.
+123.61%
Orange JuiceAs of Apr 25 2011 17:11 BST.
+24.94%
CattleAs of Apr 25 2011 17:48 BST.
+17.68%
Feeder CattleAs of Apr 25 2011 17:48 BST.
+16.29%
Frozen Pork BelliesAs of Apr 21 2011.
+33.30%
Lean HogsAs of Apr 25 2011 17:48 BST.
+15.84%
LumberAs of Apr 25 2011 17:43 BST.
-26.03%
April 25th, 2011 at 11:33 am
“…if you asked 1,000 scientists, 998 of them would say that climate change is real and that human activity — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is a significant contributor.”
And if grandma had balls you’d call her grandpa.
April 25th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Facts? What facts? How dare you bring a howitzer to a thumb war?
April 25th, 2011 at 2:23 pm
“…if you asked 1,000 scientists, 998 of them would say…
Of course you would have to carefully select that 1000 scientists. That would require avoiding the 31,000 scientists who disagree.
http://tadcronn.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/global-warming-consensus-31000-scientists-disagree/
April 26th, 2011 at 9:31 am
So, to do math for libturds – and we all know they are very challenged in that department – if 31,000 disagree, means that 15,500,000 agree. Wozers! That’s a lot of scientists who dabble in meteorology! I am sure Hiatt, with DogPrescottPile helping out with FACTCHECK (TM), can name each and every one.