Today's DarkSyde frontpage entry links to the
recent issue of Science magazine, which presented the current models showing a 12-18 foot rise in sea level. In that article, I read: "Coastal managers, real estate developers, and insurance companies, at the least, would be wise to continue to take such predictions seriously."
Now, I invest in stocks and have been following an insurance company stock for a while, so I went on over to The Motley Fool, a great community investing site, to make sure the insurance industry folks there knew about this. The Fool has a broad mix of political views as you can imagine. But I never expected to encounter the level of intense and illogical anti-global-warming thinking that I found.
I wanted to post here because I think understanding these mistaken beliefs is important as we craft messages to campaign on this issue and introduce legislation. I've heard similar objections from voters and from congresspeople. We must find ways to get our message through these sorts of objections.
The Motley Fool users are investors who, contrary to the cattle herd of most stock market investors, pride themselves on reason and analysis. I figured that, even if some might be politically conservative, certainly they would respond with interest to scientific evidence. But they did not.
Here are a sampling of quotes about global warming on The Motley Fool boards:
The Earth is an incredibly complex, highly variable system. The only real pieces of evidence in that article are: ice caps are melting faster than measured 10 years ago (which, in Earth's terms, is a meaningless number since we have no clue what that number was 1,000 and 1,000,000 years ago). There are more forest fires, which is an even harder link to make considering that forest fires are nature's way of clearing out old trees and that man on purpose has been stopping them to preserve the aesthetic virtues of his surroundings -- meaning the fires could have little to do with global warming. Similarly, an increase in droughts could just as easily be caused by a number of local factors.
Of course, I'd be the first to say anything harmful to the environment should be regulated. But should it be done at the expense of people's jobs and current well-being? That's a harder case to make without more evidence.
Although the writer professes to be an environmentalist, this is the traditional right-wing response to questions of global warming. "There's no evidence" (not true) and "investing in the future of our planet is not worth the economic cost" (not true purely from an economic sense, and also immoral). But the reply to the above post surprised me even more:
My belief is simply that the earth takes care of itself despite the legions of scientists that believe we can control or conquest the earth's nature.
But I also believe we are woefully inadequate in measuring how long these changes take over time that we cannot even conceptualize, even though we humans profess to know.
This post suprised me because it was so touchy-feely-hippie in its tone. But the class of "the earth takes care of itself" objections is not usually spouted by earth lovers. In fact, it is the one most convenient to the right-wing because it plays on people's trust in nature to excuse any kind of anti-earth behavior. My response to this comment was "The earth may take care of itself, but that doesn't mean it will take care of humans."
The other class of objections I discovered is more insidious, because it accepts the particular facts of the gloabl warming scientists but not their conclusions. This writer objected to the data in the articles and also hit upon some points raised by Al Gore in a recent interview:
"All ten of the hottest years on record, globally, have occurred in the last 15 years."
Thought: how long is "on record"? 50 years? 150 years? Sophisticated and reliable temperature gauges were not widely available more than 150 years ago, and certainly were not set up and monitored all over the globe. This "fact" is a good example of the kind of "sounds terrible, but on second thought seems meaningless" kind of "Proofs" that so annoy the skeptics. 150 years, or even 1,500 years, is but a split-second in geologic and atmospheric time...
Or how about this: "Last summer, all-time heat records were set in both the U.S. West and East." Again...the sound bite is frightening (which of course the media loves, cause it sells papers - but that is another topic), but what are the real facts? When Gore says "all-time", I am pretty sure he can't know what the heat record for the U.S. Rocky Mountain Region was in 8354 BC...
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Puh-lease...this is not science. It's really rather embarrasing..I certainly would never make an investment based on this kind of "research"...nor, I hope, would most of the people on this Board.
Lasly, another thought: we all (should have) learned about something else in 5th grade science class: it's called photosynthesis, and for those of you who skipped that day in school, it is "the process in green plants and certain other organisms by which carbohydrates are synthesized from carbon dioxide and water using light as an energy source. Most forms of photosynthesis release oxygen as a byproduct." In other words, carbon dioxide is a good thing..it is in fact, the primary element in the air that we breathe. But the Earth's balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen is dependant on having enough green plants growing on the Earth to "reduce" levels of carbon dioxide and "increase" levels of oxygen. Thus, might not the deforestation of the Earth be a better place to look for culprits (if there are any) in the warming trends?
My 2 cents: we should all be deeply concerned with the health of our precious and fragile planet. But saying that people who are not "concerned about global warming" are ignorant, is a lot like saying that people who didn't support the attack on Iraq are not patriotic...the one does not follow from the other, and it really is a partisan slap, regardless of how Mr. Kirkpatrick characterizes it.
IF the Earth is really in a warming period that has been exacerbated by human activity, let's do a better job of using the scientific method to identify what the real risks and issues are, and how best to ameliorate them. Let's not work backwards from conclusions and find "facts" (like "the worst downpour ever!") to "support" such theories.
The question the journalist starts with is "How can anyone living through today's bizarre and mutable weather not be concerned about global warming?" I think the answer is obvious...most of us are worried about a lot of things, but we prioritize our worries based on how real the risks are and weather (pun intended) there is much we can do about it. Before we agree to something like the Kyoto Protocol, which could plunge our economy into a recession that could throw millions of Americans out of work and reduce living standards for all of us...is it asking too much to tone down the silly rhetoric and get some real science?
The comment in this post about Iraq makes me think that this writer is a democrat (or at least not a right-winger), which really scares me because it shows that even on our side there are grave misunderstandings and roadblocks to action.
The objections he raises are the most insidious kind because they quote and twist the evidence in a way that makes uniformed listeners very confused. The idea that there is disagreement in the scientific community is just garbage and the attacking of scientific conclusions by non-scientists can really confuse people.
Here was my response on that message board:
The truth is that there are no real climate or earth scientists who disagree with the facts of human-caused global warming. The talking heads who do are unpublished political hacks or unscientific social scientists with political agendas. The moral question is should we take action now on an issue that will deeply affect people two or three generations from now.
The wishful thinking on this issue should not trump scientific conclusions. I understand that people don't want to incur economic costs for something they can't see. But if we took this approach with other sciences, for example medical science, we would still be using surgeons who didn't wash their hands.
SO, thanks for getting to the end of this long post.
I wanted to post this diary to get some group thinking going. Let's have a brainstorming session. What are the most effective Talking Points and cut-through-the-BS arguments that we can use to counter the naysayers in the public dialogue?