Rational Thinkers vs. Anthropogenic Global Warmingists.
Why Rational Thinkers Have (Again) Failed
The issue of so-called Global Warming or its more en vogue nom de guerre, “Climate Change” has risen to utterly dominate any and all discussions of ecology, environment, weather and climate today. Primary to the argument that the planet is undergoing a period of marked, global rise in mean temperature is the “consensus” view that human industrial activity is the cause. Indeed, many scientific publications have for some time now refused to accept any related research that fails to recognize that “warming” is occurring and worse, any such research that fails to attribute this to human activity. Today, it’s widely accepted in public science, in government and in the populace as a whole that global warming is happening and that humans are causing it to happen, and entire nations are poised to impoverish themselves based upon these “facts.”
Political Correctness: Silencing Dissent.
Anthropogenic Global Warming’s (AGW) closest ancestor is the political correctness movement that swept academia in the 1980s and ‘90s, and that continues today to put a chill on all academic research and reporting, but most especially in the liberal arts. This movement, designed by forces on the political left as a means of coercively driving thinking in a certain direction, has been very effective. Relying upon a witch-hunt mentality and the positive feedback loop this can create in academic circles, it has been wildly successful--dissent has disappeared to the point where today, adherents are able to point to current works and at the same time both deny that PC is at work and proudly crow over it’s success in chilling dissenting opinion.
As in any witch-hunt, any who speak up quickly find themselves on the outs among true believers and abandoned by those frightened into agreement or at least silence. Any who dare research, teach or speak oppositely, no matter how innocently, quickly find themselves in hot water with their academic employers or educators.
Those who might have spoken out need observe only one classmate receiving failing grades or being snubbed from post-graduate studies, or to see but a single colleague whose contract is not renewed, or whose research is de-funded or denied altogether to get the message. Seeing all the heads on pikes at the gates to the academy, and fearing for their own current or future their careers, dissenting voices whether students or professors retreated to a point over the academic horizon in the ‘90s.
This feedback loop is insidious: the fewer who are kept from teaching, speaking, researching and learning honestly, the more it appears that “no one” is disagreeing. Soon, though it’s never admitted that such a thing even exists, the canon of works and research that receives funding fits the politically correct mold. Older works deemed outside these parameters are tarred with the “ism” brush and identified as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “Euro centric,” or “patriarchal.”
Any living and still-working researchers who take exception to having their previously canonize works now dismissed as unacceptable for these reasons, are themselves shunned across academia and quickly find that unless they admit their past sins and convert to the new faith, they have become persona non grata in a world they once ruled. In this way, true believers in the PC movement are able to silence researchers retroactively, remove their works and diminish those who were not so long ago, giants in their fields. By this devious process, PCers are then able to point to the current canon in confidence, noting how little published work there is that takes a view contrary to that acceptable to PC. And clearly if “no one” in the discipline thinks “that way,” it must be wrong!
Wherever the baleful eye of PC has turned, academicians have withered before it. Very, very few in academia have been able to withstand an attack of this sort. Studies of Christopher Columbus are case in point. No longer can Columbus be referred to as the visionary navigator, great leader of men or even the expert salesman he was. Today, this man once revered by everyone from schoolchildren to sage academicians, must be viewed through the PC prism and can only be researched for his catalog of “racist and patriarchal crimes” against the native peoples he encountered, while his skills as a navigator and his vision and drive are blasted as “accidental” and “greedy.” To do otherwise invites censure by one’s peers and economic punishment from one’s institution and its financial backers.
Creationism and Intelligent Design: Prove it Didn’t Happen!
Beyond academia, and in fact seemingly utterly counter to it, are the Creationists and the Intelligent Design (ID) movements. While tracing their beginnings to a time before PC, the Creationists really didn’t get their feet under them until the ID movement that arose from the ashes of moderate Creationist defeat in the late 90s-early 2000s joined them. This movement co-opted real science and tweaked it to fit their religious mythologies. The infamous case of the fossil “human” footprints alongside those of a dinosaur had been a staple of the Creationist argument, never mind the logical flaws of the argument that goes: since scientists cannot prove that these footprints are not human then they must be human! ID has taken this sort of “reasoning” to dizzying new heights and argues that since toddler (or younger) sciences are unable to “prove” this or that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that leaves only one possibility: some “intelligence” must have created it all!
IDers say that since the “missing links” in direct assent from primordial ooze to the man on the street are not present, the complexities of the human eye are too great to ascribe to the mere “chance” of evolution. IDers further demand that evolutionists explain the symbiotic organisms that reside only in the guts of so many animals. How, they demand, did these often microscopic creatures “know” to set up housekeeping in a tiger rather than a cow, or a man rather than a goanna?
Evolutionary science cannot provide grade school-level answers to these questions, and IDers know it. They use that fact to stand before PTAs and Kiwanis club meetings, or in “debates” with evolutionist paper tigers insisting that if science can’t provide a rock-solid explanation, right now, today, then it’s clear that it’s not evolution at work, but rather the “watchmaker!”
The antilogical “reasoning” used to arrive at such conclusions is intellectually stultifying. Rational thinkers tend to either look on in gape-mouthed amazement or to dismiss as utter poppycock such anti-intellectual, religiosity. After all, it’s not science’s job to prove or disprove a Creator. Unfortunately, stunned silence is purposefully identified by IDers as arrogant dismissal, which the IDer can then point to as more evidence that “they don’t know!” or that “they are afraid to face us!”
Now imagine coupling the sort of irrational thinking that informs ID with the witch-hunt mentality of PC. But wait! You don’t have to imagine it. It’s happening. It’s called AGW--Anthropogenic Global Warming. Zealous proponents within this movement, one that bears all the major hallmarks of a religion, have (unlike their opponents) clearly not ignored the lessons of the PC and ID movements.
They use all of the dissent-silencing fear of PC while fully engaging the irrationality and generally ignorance of advanced science used by ID. But they, like these, their ideological forebears, have also turned to that most reliable of all possible allies, an indefatigable partner that they know they can always count on to help: the very people who would argue against AGW.
When the PC and Creationism/ID movements made their most outrageous arguments, who was there to bolster those arguments by agreeing that these arguments were legitimate? Their rational opposition, of course, either with frightened acquiescence (PC) or silent dismay (ID). Today, AGW counts on rational thinkers to either remain silent in abject fear, or to engage in debate only on AGW terms.
AGW has defined the terms, the parameters, the rules and the boundaries of the discussion, and rather than returning the argument to the baseline where the brighter AGWists know they can be defeated, supposed rational thinkers spend all their time debating hockey sticks, or long-term temperature charts or microbe counts in ice cores--anything, it seems to avoid addressing the foundations of AGW which are a straw man and projection.
The AGWist formula is quite simple: The AGWist begins his or her argument and bases everything after that in the straw man assertion that disagreement with AGW is tacitly stating that climate is static. From here AGW argues with the further logical fallacies of guilt by association and the vested interest fallacy that lump all rationalist thinkers on this issue in with political conservatives working to preserve the profits of “Big Oil” and with religious views that hold to the “young earth” belief. So any rational thinker enters the debate identified (and permitting that identification) as a religious nutcase who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old, who is a tool of “Big Oil,” and who believes that climate does not change.
Couple this with the classic Freudian projection used by AGW, wherein one claims that some other demonstrates a personality trait or engages in actions that the claimant him or herself actually demonstrates (in it’s more radical presentations, this is a typical to schizoid behaviors) and you’ve got a formidable foe--if you ignore the fact that your foe’s arguments are based in these untenable foundations.
No truly rational thinker believes climate does not change. And while certainly some of those who “deny” global warming do so for religious reasons, most rational thinkers find this assertion astounding in its baldly dishonest misrepresentation of their views. The historical and geologic and other records are quite clear: climate changes. Often radically, and sometimes quite quickly. At the same time AGWist are claiming that all “deniers” believe in a static climate, they also claim that absent human industrial activity, climate would not be changing today--that climate is in fact static, that if not for man, climate would not be changing.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. But rational thinkers have decided to give AGWists a pass on that old saw. Rational thinkers following the same pattern they have with the PC and ID movements is something AGW depend on. It’s as if it were a soccer (football) game in which your team’s coach says that it’s impolite to single out the fellow with the ball. Instead you can only block those on the field who hasn’t got the ball. Can there be any doubt as to the outcome of such a game?
As occurred in both the PC and ID movements, this habitual acquiescence to the opponents’ will, playing by his rules and observing his boundaries, has permitted the AGW movement to grow ever more shrill, hysterical and demanding, to the point where it is now threatening the economic health of entire nations.
While rational thinkers engage AGWists in long, heated debates over whether particulate matter in an ice core suggests 1 or 3+/- C warmer conditions 120,000 years ago, and allow AGWists to assert that behaviors certain animals have always engaged in are now evidence of anthropogenic global warming, or arguing what a two centimeter rise in sea level as opposed to a four centimeter rise will do to civilization, AGWists are having a good laugh.
Rational thinkers should be, well, rational. Why have they so easily and entirely given up the high ground time and time again? Why have they permitted their irrational, dangerous opponents to outflank them with this same maneuver again and again? Even a flatwork can be taught to avoid a heated blade. Rational thinkers behave like retarded sheep, falling into the same sink hole time and time again while AGWists, staunch opponents of rational thought, have clearly learned from the successes of their ideological kin in the PC and Creationism/ID movements.
Rather than running into the tall weeds chasing after rabbits, rational thinkers need to turn around and drop the buffalo standing in the middle of their camp. Address the foundational anti-logic of AGW (and PC and ID, too). Stop allowing those opposed to rationality, reason, and science, those working to erode Western civilization (and so far, succeeding) to set the rules, define the parameters and divert you from the baseline flaws of their arguments. Why expend weeks of your time and tens of thousands of words arguing with an AGWist over particulate counts in ice cores, walrus stampedes in the Arctic or emission standards in cars when their entire argument is built on fallacies?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for a nice juicy steak.
.)