March 17, 2007
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Global Warming Crazyness
Here is a fascinating documentary on global warming I watched today: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831
It’s pretty well put together, using all the neat documentary tricks that I am becoming used to and I can see how it would easily convince someone who isn’t well versed in the subject matter and hasn’t seen or read any of the other relevant material. I can also see how it will at the very least sew confusion and uncertainty amongst even those who have a little bit of knowledge and understanding but are not experts and rely upon the reports of the media to guide their thinking.
I gave this movie 1 star. To be fair I gave it one star after having read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle
and this
http://www.jri.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=137&Itemid=83
and this
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2326210.ece
and this
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled-carl-wunsch-responds/#more-417
and this
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1517515.ece
and this
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/#more-414
and I also listened to this which is mostly hilarious:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/thenowshow/thenowshow_20070316-1830_40_st.mp3
The part about the documentary doesn’t come up until pretty late in the program but lots of other parts of the program are funny too. Probably the funniest part actually has nothing to do with climate change but about the military.Probably had I not read and listened to these things I would have given it 2 stars… maybe… Generally I give people the benefit of the doubt and I assume that a person making a movie like this is expressing his honest beliefs and not trying to mislead anyone. Unfortunately after reading the above I cannot help but find myself not just skeptical of their conclusions but disgusted with their behavior. It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could be so immoral as to deliberately try to mislead people about something so important. I don’t have any problem with the disagreement itself. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that global warming isn’t really caused by humankind and perfectly acceptable to present evidence to the contrary, but it makes no sense at all to distort the data that is available in order to trick people into believing that global warming isn’t real. That’s grotesque. I wonder how such people are able to live with themselves.
But the thing that bothers me the most is the thought that most people who watch this aren’t going to read or listen to anything of the things I posted above. Most people will accept it at face value. Why shouldn’t they? It sounds reasonable enough. Most of the things said seem to follow rationally from the premises of the piece. Nothing seems out of the ordinary really, though you might find yourself being a little skeptical since the work is so very one sided, still you’re likely to believe that it at least hold some truth to it.
Really believe in any side of any argument by non-experts depends entirely on the degree of trust you have of the persons presenting the opinion. If I really think hard about why I really think global warming is real, it isn’t my scientific knowledge as I’m not a scientist, and it isn’t my personal experience since I know that an individual’s experience means next to nothing on the global scale. It isn’t even the light research I’ve done because most of that I did after I had already been pretty convinced and only provided evidence to solidify my convictions.
No, the reason believe is actually rather simple. The people who are arguing against climate change are by and large people that I have found to be untrustworthy in the past. They are the exact same people by and large who advocate absurd disgusting policies, preemptive war, torture, deportation. They are the very same people who seem to have mislead us in the past, whom you almost can’t help to find regularly lying or distorting information if you ever bother to double check what they are saying. They are the same people who when lacking in facts and information always always without exception will resort to name calling and base attacks on character that should be considered shameful amongst any civilized communications. In other words, I so strongly don’t trust their words that I find it difficult and distasteful to even consider putting myself on their side of any issue.
But no one is wrong or deceptive 100% of the time no matter how evil so it could be that on this issue these people I distrust are actually correct, so I have to weigh my distrust for them as much against the degree to which I find the opposite side trustworthy. What is the opposite side in this case, a plethora of institutions devoted to unbiased pursuit of knowledge through science and the dissemination of that information to regular folks like us. To put it quite simply, I have no reason to distrust these institutions. They were created for a purpose and to me knowledge I cannot recall them ever deliberately trying to mislead me. In contrast to the bloggers, radio show hosts, and tv pundits who espouse their anti-global warming rhetoric between rants of hate speech against whatever group happens to disagree with them at the moment the record of the scientific community is pristine.
Of course, I have little doubt that the people who vehemently disagree with climate change being caused by man, at least the ones who are honest and truly believe what they are saying, are likely similarly convinced in part by their degree of trust or distrust for the parties involved. For example, whenever I talk to people who are opposed to climate change I frequently hear numerous arguments about how “untrustworthy” Al Gore is. Indeed it soon becomes largely clear that a lot of people who disagree with the science of global warming do so in large part because they don’t trust the messenger. Likewise they tend to have a good deal more trust and faith in the various pundits and radio hosts and bloggers whom I have come to distrust strongly. I think their trust and distrust is founded on lies, but I don’t begrudge people their beliefs. It could very well be that I am the one being lied to.
Any reasonable person must acknowledge the possibility that they could be wrong, that they’ve bet on the wrong horse in this case. And I will not hesitate to do so, but if I do I find that I am wrong, that global warming really is a myth and a vast conspiracy I still will not believe that I was wrong to have bet on the side that I did. I believe that betting on global warming being real and really caused by humans is the rational bet to make even if you aren’t a scientist and don’t have the knowledge or skill to be able to navigate between competing scientific rhetoric that all sounds esoteric and incoherent to you. On top of the issue of trustworthiness of the messengers, there’s the vast difference in consequences should one side prove wrong than the other. A radically changed planet versus a few industries not making as much money as they like pretty much sums it up. I don’t believe in accepting concensuses simply because they are the concensus, but I prefer to believe that our understanding as a species of the way we impact the world in which we live is constantly improving rather than believe that science is a great sham full of greedy competition to convince people of a various untruths in order to gain wealth. If it turns out that the latter is true, and scientific research in this field has been grotesquely distorted by bias, money, and conflicts of interests, well then I will gladly struggle with all my worth to try and reform the way science is done in this world to ensure that such a thing can never happen again. And I strongly suspect and hope that most scientists would be just as devoted to doing the same thing. I think it is reasonable for now to give them at least a little of the benefit of the doubt. The world may regret it strongly if we do not.
