The Climate has Always Changed

 One of the benefits of studying climate is you learn to spot faulty arguments. Or, if you are the devious type, you learn how to “pull the wool over someone’s eyes”.

If you talk about climate, you have heard people say, “Everyone knows the climate changes.” This is the #1 denier comment. 

Think about this statement for a minute before reading on. Is there something too easy and ingratiating in it? Is it just a safe simplistic comment no one can argue against? What is it omitting? Is it comfortably implying we can simply turn up the A/C and eventually the climate will take care of itself?

The big questions confronting man today do not include, “Does the climate change?” The question is, “Is man causing the documented extremely rapid warming of the earth, is it dangerous, and can we do something about it?”

The answer to these three questions is yes.

If you hear someone say, “But the climate is always changing!”, may I suggest you respond by saying, “Yes, no one disputes your statement.  It is the RATE of warming which is dangerous. We are warming ten times faster than any other period identifiable.” You may add, “Your statement downplays the life-threatening speed with which we are warming.”

Or, if you want to study up on logical fallacies, you might say, “You are jumping to the conclusion the rapid rate of warming today is equivalent to the normal slow-motion rate of climate change the earth undergoes every 100,000 years.  Thus, you are building a strawman argument, implying today’s climate change is harmless. I am not falling for it. The rate of CO2 accumulation caused by man is greater than the five extinction events scientists have identified before man walked on earth. This is causing warming ten times faster.  On a positive note, since we are causing rapid climate change, we can reverse it. That is, if we have the willpower.”

We are all living in an era dominated by prolific lying and, concurrently, our inability to sort out truth from lies. Our basic education rarely taught us critical thinking skills, spotting logical fallacies, or building decision making processes to create informed opinions.

One way to sharpen our ability to spot climate logical fallacies is by going to skepticalscience.org and downloading the humorous “Cranky Uncle” app and/or buying the book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address - 335

Lincoln gave two great speeches: the Gettysburg Address and his second Inaugural Address. His second inaugural address must have come as a surprise to most Americans. He had just won a landslide election, and the Union Armies had defeated the Confederate Insurgency. You would think he would have taken a victory lap. But the President was wrestling with God's purpose. Why had the nation, both sides, suffered so grievously? In a country of only 32 million, 650 to 750,000 soldiers had died. Lincoln believed the nation was being punished for the institution of slavery. The South for creating its wealth on the backs of the blacks, but also the North for being too slow to challenge the appalling injustice of slavery. Seven times in his short speech, Lincoln referred to the book from which he had learned to read. The book he referenced was the King James version of the Bible. Here is his speech: "Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of the presidenti...
Read more

Right Wing Wokeism - 344

China Must Be Thrilled Donald Trump was elected to manage borders and curb left-wing wokeism, but his right-wing wokeism—attacking electric vehicles and renewable energy because they don't fit MAGA ideology—is equally senseless and against national interests. Ironically, his own base benefits from renewables. The five states with the largest share of wind power are red states, generating at least a third of their power from wind. This is about geography, not politics. Rural America has vast solar and wind potential and is already capitalizing on it, regardless of voting patterns. More critically, Trump's "drill, baby, drill" approach at a time when artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous technology are advancing will not make America great again. Instead, it risks making China great again. Trump once boasted about sending Americans to Mars. The real question is whether a Chinese astronaut will greet them there, asking, "What took you so...
Read more

Power Corrupts - 342

A Link between Slavery & Big Oil   Noam Chomsky, one of the world's most quoted authors, expresses his opinion of the Big Oil misinformation campaign: "I don't know what word in the language—I can't find one—that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word 'evil' doesn't begin to approach it." Was there another time in US history when evil ruled?  Let's look at the United States before the Civil War. In the South, there were 4 million enslaved people. The slaves, or their parents, or grandparents, or someone in their lineage had been kidnapped, shackled, and shipped to the Americas to spend their lives with no freedom whatsoever. This criminal operation started in 1619 and accelerated until the Union forces ended it. The black humans had no rights and were conveniently labeled as les...
Read more