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Climate Talk Jan 2009
By Dr. Mark D. Nispel | January 19, 2009
It recently amazed me to look back and see that it has been almost a year since I wrote my last significant post on climate issues.[1] And it has been almost two years since I finished my first series of 8 entries on climate.[2] It’s time for a bit of an update and a bit of critical reflection on my thoughts from two years ago.
First let’s consider the status of the politics and current bodies of opinion.
The promoters of the idea of majority position regarding Global Warming are as active as ever. Fmr. Vice-President Al Gore, Jim Hansen of NASA, and many others continue to evangelize the issue urgently, having the upper hand in the message generally presented in the official press. As it now appears, the second half of 2007 represented the zenith of the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) coalition and consensus. Calls to action have continued since then unabated.
However, the consensus of the majority opinion which was claimed at that time and was to a significant degree demonstrated[3] is no longer so overwhelmingly unified. There are now many organized and significant voices of minority points of view that regularly argue against what must still be admitted as the majority view of AGW.[4]. Somewhat out of impatience, I imagine, and out of reaction to annoying minority voices, the majority view has taken to more extreme political maneuvers to push forward their agenda. They have resorted to demeaning ad hominem attacks on those who do not agree with their truth. Those who do not agree that AGW is the pending disaster portrayed are labeled “skeptics” or “deniers”, as pejorative labels, for example. And Al Gore suggested that those who do not accept the majority view are
“in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re
almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged
in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat”.[5]
All of this is typical of movements that are not winning to their satisfaction in the arena of ideas but still hope to win in the arena of political force. And that is exactly the realm the skeptical minorities are intent on not losing, being mostly unified by common rejection of the majority’s wish to push major legal changes onto society in the name of carbon footprint reduction. In other words, the unifying argument behind much of the “AGW skeptic” movement is an economic argument that big government intervention in the economy in the name of AGW is a bad idea.
And in this fashion much of the AGW argument has landed in the realm of politics rather than science. Just now as the science consensus is not so sure as before for a variety of reasons, the political engines are winding up on both sides. Once that happens the scientific voice is typically drowned out by the voices of rhetorical argument, the facts be damned.
As a final comment, back in 2007 there was the beginning of an interesting movement of evangelical Christians coming out in favor of the idea of AGW and reforms to counter it, the so-called Green Evangelicals who promote “creation care”. The movement was broader than AGW but AGW seemed to be a significant part of the overall platform. At any rate, this movement seems to have struggled to build momentum and not too much is heard from it at this time.
m.
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1. From this blog, Feb. 19, 2008: Climate in Jan/Feb 2008. And March 2, 2008: “Global Warming” vs “Global Cooling”
2. See Climate Talk#1 through Climate Talk #8.
4. There are many websites now that regularly publish points of view opposing AGW. For example, Anthony Watts, and IceCap. There are now many published opinions (especially from non-US scientists) that the earth is beginning a period of cooling instead of warming. These alternate voices were not nearly so numerous in 2007. There are more scientists now regularly questioning the idea of “consensus”. See the paper Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate, printed by the Heartland Institute, for example.
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