Fight! Fight! Fight!

A short time ago I decided to see what this Twitter malarkey was all about. So I joined and found that few of my friends were on it really. I did the thing you usually do when you join Twitter, and that's follow @stephenfry. He's a national treasure. Its the law. It became a kind of personal Heat magazine for me, as I found people like Derren Brown, Gervias, Martin, Ginger Wildheart and Teller. The stuff they update is mildly interesting / amusing at best and I soon lost interest in it. I did check back every now and then though, and I saw a post by a person I both respect and admire, the coolest ginger on the planet; Tim Minchin.

Not only is he a highly skilled pianist, he is also an advocate of rational, logic reasoning and scientific thinking. Full marks, I tip my hat. However, he happened to post a link to an article in the LA times which stated that climate change skepticism was being taught now in schools alongside the AGW theory. He was saying how this is wrong, and that its skepticism based upon politically motivated reasoning.

He couldn't be more mis-informed. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who started this scam, was politically motivated in his actions. So I 'tweeted' back at Tim, that skepticism is good. I mentioned three scientists that prove this point; Newton, Einstein and Bohr. Each of those physicists interpreted the world in a new way. We had Newton's law of gravity, then Einstein's special theory of relativity, then Bohr gave us the quantum. Each one changed the way we saw the world, each one broke new ground and aided understanding. Its what science does, we do the best we can with the information we have. As time changes, we change that understanding. Skepticism isn't just good, its necessary.

So then, surprisingly, Minchin tweeted me back, claiming that good skepticism is good, but bad isn't. Well now, this is a whole new ball game isn't it? 'Good' is a concept. And its a subjective one. Your good might be my evil, and vice versa. Is good result based or intention based? Who decides? On what grounds? Its a hard conversation to have over Twitter using only 160 characters. I did explain this to him however, and he never tweeted back. Why would he?

It did make me marvel though, that this man, this science heavy, rational thinker would not apply the same scrutiny and reasoning on global warming. Why would he take some facts as red and not look into those from the other side?

Recently there has been some news regarding Michael Mann, the creator of the infamous 'hockey stick' graph, used to great effect by Al Gore in that brilliant piece of fiction 'An Inconvenient Truth' (for an explanation of why its fiction, see the bottom of this piece). Turns out Mann's hockey stick, showing that there has been a huge surge in CO2 and temperature recently was bullshit. To get to that conclusion though, Mann had to be subpoenaed by a court, demanding the algorithms he used to get the graph. They then fed random data into his program, and the graph was the same every time.

There is plenty of evidence that challenges climate change, and as such it is not the 'settled science' they'd have you think it is. No science is settled. Physics is a wonderful example of this. In the quest to find a theory of everything (TOE...chortle), physicists have propsed ideas such as M-theory, multiple dimensions, string theory, superstring theory, and even posited the notion that we are in a universe of bubbles, each bubble being a different universe. Mental, but who's to say? We are a tiny species on a small insignificant planet, and have no idea how the universe works. We don't even know how WE work yet. Not entirely. The brain remains a mystery.

It disappointed me that Minchin was so unscientific. I thought he was a good thinker. He's sadly been duped into feeling guilty about this stuff, like so many others. It seems the more they have the more guilty they feel, so the louder they shout about it. Rock stars and politicians banging on about climate change does one thing: makes them feel good. Anyone with half a life is too damn busy to worry about standby lights. Taking everything at face value is easy, it requires little cognitive effort and allows us to feel how we want to. Cognitive dissonance that results from not being sure isn't very relaxing and needs to be sorted fast.

There's a current documentary doing the rounds called Earthlings. Its about how humans are, like, really bad, and like, animals n that, they're like, really nice n stuff?

Yeah, its made by a fucking vegan. I can't see it being very objective. I will attempt to watch it without laughing, but I can't see it happening. Even the trailer was biased and ignorant, showing all the like, really bad things? That like, humans have done and stuff? Well he could have shown footage of doctors, have-a-go heroes, man walking on the moon, toddlers at play, scientific achievements. Anything fluffy. He was selective in the fucking trailer, he's going to be selective in the film. Its not an argument, its biased. The sad and scary thing is, people buy into it. Without thinking, without researching, without discussing. Because it suits them to do so. It makes them kind, caring, considerate. More the person they want you to think they are. More of the person they want to be.

Face value is a dangerous thing, though I appreciate there's little time to look into everything, certain things should be investigated. If you harbour the same opinions after you've done that, good on you, but if you don't....even better on you. I expect Minchin has the time and resources to look into things, but chooses not to. Its disappointing. I enjoyed our back and forth Tim, and can't tell whether you stopped replying to me because you were on to a loser, or you just thought that your time is worth more than communicating with one of your random ticket buyers.



The following is from the eco-warriors handbook, and is advice on how to handle 'deniers' on web sites, forums, chat rooms etc:

1) Use the 'Denier' insult or equate deniers with creationists
2) Imply links to big oil or fossil fuel industry
3) Use phrase "Oh yeh, it's all a massive conspiracy"
4) Quote selective data from 1979 onwards
5) Refer to Peer review process as if infallible
6) Refer to IPCC as if were not political organization
7) Claim all the worlds scientist agree
8) Denigrate as 'weatherman' world's most viewed climate site.
9) Denigrate reputation of scientist or journalist
10) General insults, best placed at end of comment.


ELEVEN “FACTS” CHALLENGED - AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

• SOURCE: English and Wales High Court Decisions

1. The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

2. The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

3. The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.

4. The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.

5. The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr. Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

6. The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

7. The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

8. The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

9. The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

10.The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7 meters causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 32cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

11.The film claims that rising sea levels have caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

After the court hearing, the film was no longer permitted to be shown in schools as an educational film. Result.