A new movie to be released in October: Not Evil, Just Wrong. Title made me laugh, anyway. (I feel that way about so many things. But then I get trapped in pseudo-philosophical circular debates–if it’s wrong, is it evil? Hmmm. Deep thoughts with Andrea…)
Just heard a snippet of an interview with the producers who declared that “children are an endangered species,” which also made me laugh.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHMOEVRysWE]








Global temperatures are rising! The world as we know it is about to end! Repent! Repent, ye evil polluters, before it is too late!
Now I think that we have a duty to minimize our footprint on this earth, to reserve resources for those who might need them more. But this hysteria over global warming seems to be a whole lot of smoke and noise, with people doing very little to actually change their ways.
If global temperatures rise, the world will keep on turning. People will die; others will be born.
The quote (“children are an endangered species,”) did not make me laugh. It rings all too true. Can the producers be mistaken? … Just wrong?
I mentioned NEJW on my blog a while ago… if I can dig up the link…
http://moronality.blogspot.com/2009/07/judging-science.html
In brief, I decided that environmental campaigners are possibly wrong on many of their issues, and are not the most rational of people – but that NEJW is probably no better, it’s creators appearing to be driven by a precieved ideological culture war against liberals rather than any desire for actual scientific debate.
I will be passing my final judgement on them when the film comes out.
The quote (“children are an endangered species,”) did not make me laugh. Are the producers being too charitable? … Just wrong?
Moral equivalency anyone? See Suricou Raven’s comment above.
Equivilency indeed. Enviromental activists do tend to be fanatical and over-exciteable, but so to these corresponding counter-activists. Both are using highly distorted scientific claims and exagerated doomsday scenarios of what will happen if the other side wins.
Just look at some of those claims. Global warming is a good thing because ‘ice is the enemy of life?’ That’s a great soundbite, but it’s completly meaningless. Extreme heat is just as bad as extreme cold, just look at the great deserts. And then another one claims that without industry humans will go extinct in a generation. Scarey, but, really… how would that happen?
These arn’t rational arguments, any more than are the environemental activists posters of dying polar bears and claims that New York will be submerged. They are intended to scare people, that’s all. As bad as each other.
All that is required is a little digging in the history books to realize that in the warm cycles the earth goes through prosperity is the name of the game. When the cycle changes to the cooler periods there is famine and death from a multitude of reasons amongst the poor of the planet. It has always been like that and all the ecofreaks in the world can not change it.
Please note: Since the last ice age earth has been warming. If it ever starts back in the other direction we are all in big trouble. Just sayin. Ya know what I mean eh.
I’d like to back Suricou on his main point. Hysteria doesn’t help anyone. The counter to apocalyptic environmentalist rhetoric (the kind that suggest “deniers” should be treated like criminals) is not apocalyptic rhetoric of another kind. If the argument is made in this movie that we should be more fearful of an ice-age than temperatures being a little bit hotter, that sounds like a straw-man argument to me. If there’s going to be an ice-age, I doubt there’s anything we could do about it anyways, so why worry?
Who really knows whether we’re better off in general with temperatures being a bit hotter or cooler? Different parts of the world benefit/respond in different ways. Moreover, the biosphere adapts, and so do human beings. I think scientists take very static views of a very plastic system.
What bothers me most though is how the majority faction claims there is consensus and that the debate is over, pretending there is no serious scientific argument that casts any doubt on it. Dissenters as dismissed as “deniers” or “on the payroll of Big Oil(TM)”. I think this demonstrates just how much ideology and politics factors into science, especially poorly understood subjects like the weather.
My money’s on Anthropogenic Global Warming being wrong, because I don’t trust scientists who don’t see a need to continue to defend their theory from critics, and just declare the debate over.
For humans, any significent climate change would be a bad thing. Hotter or colder. We have everything set up nicely right now: The people are where the food grows, the food is where the climate permits it to grow. A cooler global temperature would mean have of Russia and Canada lose their agricultural capacity, while a higher global temperature means the middle east and Africa lose theirs. Either way, disaster.
I’ve weighed up the arguments as best a non-climatologist can, and concluded so far that anthropogenic climate change is definatly happening, but it’s not going to be nearly so severe as the doomsayers predict. At least, not for me. Worst case, yet more famine in places where it’s already so common it’s not even news.
I guess it depends on how significant the change is. Large variations from the current temperature are obviously bad. Small variations are not, and some regions will benefit at the expense of other regions. Furthermore, the Earth is a highly complex system which frequently evades our attempts to predict it on a year-over-year basis. Even precipitation does not map directly with temperature. In summary, change is bad for the status quo, but it’s wrong to look only at how it brings disaster.