The Heartland Institute has unveiled a scurrilous billboard campaign in Chicago. It features an image of Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber (and holder of a PhD in mathematics) next to the words, "I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?"
Climate-change activists and denialists alike are quite familiar with the Heartland Institute's leading role in fighting fear with fear. On the one hand—and I'll be the first to say so—many global-warming activists have fear-driven motives and unrealistic ideas of what's possible. But the denialist claim that these activists amount to an existential threat is as paranoid as the Unabomber's manifesto. The institute defends its inflammatory campaign in kind, saying "the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen." They're just being provocative, they say, just responding to attacks. Can't we take a joke?
I'll put my picture on that billboard instead. I know the basics of global warming and I'm happy to teach them to my readers. Understanding the physics of global warming, and the greenhouse gases causing it, is as simple as understanding interest on a bank account. And Richard Nordquist, the About.com Guide to Grammar, will tell you that the Heartland billboard is a textbook example of the ad hominem fallacy.
Comments
Hey Andrew…how many million of tons of greenhouse gasses do volcanoes put into the atmosphere every year?
It’s not man made…it’s a naturally occurring cycle; andby cycle I don’t mean it’s necessarily a “regular” cycle that repeats every x number of years. It is an ebb and flow that the earth’s atmosphere can recover from naturally.
Great post, Andrew, and your photoshopped sign is hilarious and will shortly be copied by me!
Jason, what’s your point? The answer is that volcanoes emit less than 1 percent as much CO2 as humans do (about 200 megatons versus about 35 gigatons per year). Volcanoes are not the problem. We seem to be violently agreeing.
Love the photoshopped sign. I think the URL ought to be changed to something more informed and informative though.
Andrew:
Kinda hard to ignore the recent Global Warming. Applying the anthropological handle on it seems to be getting the passions stirred. I have been studying the Greenland Ice drilling programs, and was recently struck by the overwhelmingly positive impact that the Medieval Warm Period had on civilization. Settlements in Greenland and the rapid expansion of low-latitude crops into Europe and the British Isles. The effects seemed great for humanity; nobody seemed to notice that all the Polar Bears died off… or did they?
That climatic event was followed by the Little Ice Age, which put an end to the temperate crops in Europe, advanced glaciers in the Alps overriding villages, froze over the Hudson and the Thames, plunging humanity into a deep spiral of economic despair.
Nowhere in the literature do I find either of those two global climate change events assigned an anthropological cause. Back then it was just “the weather”.
That’s right, Michael, those climatic excursions are generally not blamed on human causes. Have you seen the trends since the Little Ice Age, though, in human CO2 output? It is an enormous forcing, way out of proportion to natural fluctuations, and it’s not fluctuating either, it’s a big push in one direction. Today’s growing problem is not just “the weather.”
Andrew, I appreciate your thoughtful and determined rebuttal of the climate change deniers. Keep up your excellent work.
Global warming can be a natural progression of earths rotation as well as progress.
This is my argument, as the earth rotates and proof is in the fact that iron ores in the ground in millions of years and layers, point north with is 360 degrees, based on the fact that north has been at different points in the history of this planet.
You can melt them but after cooling, they still point in the direction of the magnetic north they had when they were formed??????
Right now the earth is about 484 feet east of north as the north magnet shows???????
Eclipse orbit and not spherical orbit support as such by physics laws as we understand at this time???????
I am not saying the past regulation similar to regulations now of what has been tested or known is much different.
We still have most chemicals and industry that makes such products, where we do not know the long term effects.
There are several way to change that are far more profitable than the way we do things now, but the people who benefit and ask of others to suffer for them are the pricipal cause.
We live in an age where we have better access to information, but many of learn as others from those who know something, or a little.
I always try to cross train on subjects due to the fact, most books are written by people who had some training or access to some parts of the knowledge they seek to teach, but we find there are others who had access to more training and information, who know something others did not?????
thanks
linzeytoole@yahoo.com