frankly, he sounds like a twit
Like today, some people demanded thirty years ago that we must take dramatic steps to halt the inevitable expansion of ice and save mankind. Suggestions three decades ago included melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers to melt the ice. (Yes, you read that right.) Today\ufffds suggestions are no less loony, and include Al Gore\ufffds idea of eliminating the combustion engine (that means taking away your cars) to stuffing corks into cows\ufffd behinds because they produce methane (a \ufffdgreenhouse\ufffd gas).Yeah, right, the ol' "some people" trope ("Some people think that America should just surrender in Iraq, forcibly convert all its citizens to Islam, mandate clitorectomies for all girls on their thirteenth birthday and rethink certain provisions of the Patriot Act, but I don't agree with them!").
Look, box, I readily grant that a lot of people—far too many—who are braying about "global warming" are doing so without a shred of relevant technical background, and advance their positions rather as a matter of faith and not after an informed analysis of the evidence and arguments on either side. This goes, incidentally, for many of the reflexive debunkers as well as for the sandal-and-tiedye set. I call myself "agnostic" on the subject because I am very far (as, I suspect, most of us are in this dust-up) from having the chops to read the extant literature intelligently. I am also unable to parse the sort of papers on quantum physics that are subject to peer review, and am obliged to rely on the works of popularizers who can gear the subject down to the comprehension of a poor besotted old English major, and I suppose that I must perforce accept the existence of leptons, neutrinos and quarks as a matter of uncritical belief. In this subatomic realm I rely on the claims of a community of scientists who have advanced hypotheses as to the nature and behavior of these droll particles, and who have submitted experimental evidence to peer review. The beepster would have us believe that the absence of published papers treating the four basic elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water in modern physics journals is the consequence of a conspiracy of silence against the Aristotelian School.
I grant as well that climatology is an inexact science, and that much remains to be discovered as to how the various elements interact with one another, and what the long-term consequences of human contributions to atmospheric carbon might be. I will cheerfully mock anyone on the Green side who avers that these questions are settled. I accept Al Gore's sincerity (and really, box, that "invented the internet" was not merely a cheap shot but a tired and discredited one) and am inclined to believe that he has probably studied the issue for longer than any of us here, but I do not take his every pronouncement as gospel. I note that a preponderance of scientists presently active who have addressed the issue appear to have concluded that the past two hundred years of human-initiated carbon emissions are directly related to the observed rising levels of atmospheric CO2, and that a majority of these believe that those rising levels contribute to the "greenhouse effect," i.e., "global warming," and that many of those have concluded that "global warming" could have some consequences we might not like.
Against these modest proposals we are asked to believe that a conspiracy exists by "liberal" scientists (who really know better, but who hate American prosperity) variously to inflate the data or lie outright, and whose monolithic steamrolling of all dissent is opposed by only a brave band of maverick journalists (e.g., the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal), a small, embattled television outlet (Fox News), a few radio talk show hosts and here and there a lone iconoclastic scientist sustained only by the Truth and a nice stipend from the energy sector. I ain't buyin', and I find beep's notion that just because the majority of climate scientists hold a position he doesn't he agree with, then they must be squashing the real majority that would...uh-uh.
Regarding the finer points of "global warming" and what should be the public policy responses...well, these are matters on which reasonable men may reasonably disagree. For the rest, though...well, I hate to keep returning to my tobacco analogy, but if in your survey of ten oncologists you find eight concluding that there's a link between smoking and lung cancer, and two denying this, and if you notice that the two dissenters are both on retainer with R.J. Reynolds...well, a conclusion kind of invites itself, don't it?
cordially,
