Climate skeptics step it up?

[CaptainPanic]

There is a horror story in the making...

 

The climate skeptics really seem to step it up suddenly. They seem to think that the worst thing in the world that can happen is that we invest in sustainable energy.

 

The media are completely filled with their ideas this week - mainstream media, radio, tv, blogs, forums. Skeptics are everywhere suddenly... with the Copenhagen meeting just around the corner. The glaciers aren't melting. The deforestation doesn't have much impact on CO2. Climatologists committed fraud on a large scale. It's a forest of articles, blogs, posts, people linking to each other - and with each new article linking to other blogs, linking to other sources...

 

Nobody seems to offer a new theory. The whole campaign seems like a bunch of unrelated articles... but the only thing they all have related is that they just want to destroy the current theory.

 

I'm afraid that they might succeed in convincing the uneducated layman that this is a giant conspiracy of "The Scientists" against "The People" in which "The Scientists" want to "The People" that there is a "Global Warming" danger so that they can Spend All The Money. *evil laughter*

Can someone explain why people think that "The Scientists" are the evil here? How did this happen?

 

The only explanation I have is too evil to dream of: Is there a planned worldwide smear campaign against CO2 reduction going on? Are there really people who are employed by someone to sit behind a computer full-time to start blogs, and write articles about this? I don't want to believe it has come to this. Our beautiful internet - it seemed such a good idea, but all it did was enable some people to misinform the masses even easier.

Edited November 24, 2009 by CaptainPanic

[padren]

I'm afraid that they might succeed in convincing the uneducated layman that this is a giant conspiracy of "The Scientists" against "The People" in which "The Scientists" want to "The People" that there is a "Global Warming" danger so that they can Spend All The Money. *evil laughter*

Can someone explain why people think that "The Scientists" are the evil here? How did this happen?

 

Why would scientists manufacture a global crisis to spend money? Isn't it common knowledge that it's both more profitable and socially acceptable just to manufacture a war?

 

On a more serious note while we avoid "appeals to authority" as a logical fallacy and stick to logical arguments based on empirical evidence... for those that are overwhelmed by the logical arguments and don't know how to assess the evidence, they are effectively being asked to "trust us, we know" as if we were the defacto authority. They are of course, free to investigate the issues themselves, make rational, logical challenges but that doesn't help if they are incapable of making such challenges.

 

They could take a huge amount of time out of their lives to try and get up to speed (and considering the dire situation, I don't personally feel that's a lot to ask) but if they feel they cannot do this due to busy work lives and bad experiences with learning science in the past, then what tools do they really have to evaluate the issue?

 

We can see through a lot of this and understand the terrain, but they are being led around in the dark, by the very people they used to give wedgies to and shove in lockers.

Sadly, it's easy to feed distrust in such situations.

[npts2020]

So much for the idea of an overwhelmingly liberal media in the U.S., eh?