Monday, October 24, 2005

Global Warming Propaganda Alert


I’m nursing the blues this morning from yesterday’s Packer’s fiasco when I see a Wisconsin State Journal headline, The Truth About Global Warming. It worries me when the MSM proclaims THE TRUTH, especially in the form of an article by a journalist who attended a meeting of the converted. The story is a reprint of a Seattle Times article and it is a well written piece of propaganda.

Like all effective propaganda it doesn’t insult the readers intelligence but rather plays to emotion with the minimal amount of fact needed to weave a plausible story. This is long piece for a newspaper so I am only going to pull illustrative sections.

First and foremost notice the article never gets specific about threats or dangers.
More than a decade later, Wallace still won't blame global warming for any specific heat wave, drought or flood — including the recent devastating hurricanes. But he no longer doubts the problem is real and the risks profound. "With each passing year the evidence has gotten stronger — and is getting stronger still."
Second, pay attention to the limited time frame being used to justify sweeping generalizations about climate on a 4 Billion year old planet. More importantly, notice there is no definition of temperature. What is the temperature right now? Is it the same 1000 feet up, 10,000 feet up, an hour ago, eight hours ago, or three days ago? Temperature is a very crude measurement of total energy at a specific time and place, and says very little about the total amount of energy in a complex, dynamic and open system like the entire planetary atmosphere.
1995 was the hottest year on record until it was eclipsed by 1997 — then 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Melting ice has driven Alaska Natives from seal-hunting areas used for generations. Glaciers around the globe are shrinking so rapidly many could disappear before the middle of the century.
Third, science is not creating a plausible explanation or building a concensus. When you turn on your computer it works because the proper voltage and resistance is precisely defined to make a complex system work. Science is defined by correct explanations, whereas politics is about building a concensus agreement that makes people happy.
As one study after another has pointed to carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions as the most plausible explanation, the cautious community of science has embraced an idea initially dismissed as far-fetched. The result is a convergence of opinion rarely seen in a profession where attacking each other's work is part of the process.
Fourth, climate change is continual on the planet and if you believe volcanoes are slow acting factors you are simply not paying attention the eruptions happening right now.
Earth's climate has swung from steamy to icy many times in the past, but scientists believe they know what triggered many of those fluctuations. Erupting volcanoes and slow ocean upwelling release carbon dioxide, which leads to warming.
Fifth, the majority of supporting “evidence” for the theory is based on computer models that don’t agree and don’t predict with any accuracy. This goes back to point one, that the theory can not establish specific and reproducible results. Hell, they can't even reproduce the past which they just claimed to understand in the above quote.
Climate models debated: But scientists say the uncertainty lies only in how much warming to expect. .. The world was hot because carbon-dioxide levels were three to five times higher than today — the result of a gradual buildup from volcanic eruptions. But global-climate computer models, which use mathematical formulas to represent complex atmospheric interactions, aren't able to reproduce that warming. When Battisti runs the models under Eocene-like conditions, they come up with much lower temperatures than actually existed — which means something was going on that scientists don't yet understand.
Global Warming is a fictional horror story being sold to the public to advance a political agenda. It is a well written piece of fiction by intelligent individuals funded by cash rich organizations and sympathetic aspects of the government. This scary future story will increasingly be marketed directly to a public mostly untrained in scientific skepticism. Left unchallenged, this Piped Piper tune will beckon the population into giving up their freedom of movement, which is the goal of those who desire to efficiently control the subjects.