No matter how badly and persistently exposed and discredited they become, the stalwarts of the global warming denial industry just keep at it. Give them a moment of your time and you'll be overwhelmed with information, some of it distorted and a lot of it deliberately made up. The worst part is that a lot of this nonsense gets distributed and thereby effectively validated by the right-wing media.
What to do? If you want the other side of the story, truth instead of fiction, go to http://www.realclimate.org/ the site that bills itself as "Climate Science from Climate Scientists." Some of the articles are, admittedly, directed to scientists but they make an effort to include a lot of information that is digestible by lay people like me.
They also post a convenient index of sources you can reference, sorted by the reader's existing knowledge of global warming science.
There's going to be a lot of debate in Canada over global warming and what to do about it. The more you know the easier that debate will be to understand.
My favorite little side story to the whole denier trade is the systematic regurgitating of old myths against scientists from previous eras.
ReplyDeleteHow else to explain the growing antagonism to Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, who died 45 years ago. Seems I can go more than a few days without encountering another scathing and detailed attack on her reputation when her crowning achievement was simply *simply* point out in a poignant way that we ought to do some tests before we just start dousing the planet (and our households) with any chemical that comes out of the lab.
Now she's being accused of causing countless deaths through anecodotal what-if scenarios with no basis in any fact because it's a history that doesn't exist, has never existed, and never will exist unless they know some secret wormhole for gaging the state of the world by adjusting the scientific, socio-economic, and political status of 1960..
Serously. You'd think she was Hitler or something.
Damn that Galileo and his insistence that the earth wasn't the center of the universe. Why, we would have cured Cancer by now if that rabble rouser hadn't come along . . .
Thanks for that link. I'm so frustrated by the lack of reporting on this.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote: The worst part is that a lot of this nonsense gets distributed and thereby effectively validated by the right-wing media.
I say all media.
Thanks for the link; I’ve added it to my blog.
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly hard sometimes for people to make sense of this issue, particularly when the other side is well funded and purposely clouding the scientific facts. Because of this, it’s always good to see real scientists speaking the truth to the general public.