Canadian conservative paper; Global warming deniers a "liability"

[BenBurch]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com...rs-are-a-liability-to-the-conservative-cause/

<SNIP>

How has this tiny 2-3% sliver of fringe opinion been reinvented as a perpetually “growing” share of the scientific community? Most climate-change deniers (or “skeptics,” or whatever term one prefers) tend to inhabit militantly right-wing blogs and other Internet echo chambers populated entirely by other deniers. In these electronic enclaves — where a smattering of citations to legitimate scientific authorities typically is larded up with heaps of add-on commentary from pundits, economists and YouTube jesters who haven’t any formal training in climate sciences — it becomes easy to swallow the fallacy that the whole world, including the respected scientific community, is jumping on the denier bandwagon.

This is a phenomenon that should worry not only environmentalists, but also conservatives themselves: The conviction that global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud now has become a leading bullet point within mainstream North American conservatism; and so has come to bathe the whole movement in its increasingly crankish, conspiratorial glow.

<SNIP>

I think that is about the end of Denialism from a political point of view. If this idea takes root, and I think it shall, nobody is going to pay them to manufacture their astroturf dissent any more.

 

[Furcifer]

Did you read the comments? They have decidedly "denialist" overtones. If they are representative of the general public opinion it's far from over.

 

[Corsair 115]

The National Post? Are they still in business? Last I heard they didn't publish issues on Mondays during the summer to save costs. (I guess if a major story happened on Sunday you're out of luck being able to read it in their paper Monday morning.)

 

[bit_pattern]

Did you read the comments? They have decidedly "denialist" overtones. If they are representative of the general public opinion it's far from over.

Highly doubtful, post anything about climate on the internet these days and you can be sure the denier-bots will be all over the comments, especially when you saying something negative about deniers in the National Post, which has been a bastion of Canadian denialism for years now.

 

[Captain.Sassy]

This is good news. I've read a bunch of denialist editorials in that rag.

(I'm also disappointed it hasn't gone out of business yet...)


In any case, yeah I mean I see Canada getting pulled into the kind of culture war politics that seems to pervade the US, where lines drawn in the sand turn into concrete barriers topped with razor wire. Hopefully this signals that on climate change, and maybe on some other issues too (?) we can steer away from this unproductive course.

Of course the tories have a bunch of climate denial types in their core support... IIRC there was a tory fundraiser not too long ago put on by a group called 'The Friends of Science' which advocates, among other things, that gravity was decreed by God 4000 years ago and that lions emerge from the sand when the sun sets on the outgoing tide.

 

[lomiller]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com...rs-are-a-liability-to-the-conservative-cause/



I think that is about the end of Denialism from a political point of view. If this idea takes root, and I think it shall, nobody is going to pay them to manufacture their astroturf dissent any more.

There is too much advertising money being spent on denial for it to go away.

 

[Corsair 115]

In any case, yeah I mean I see Canada getting pulled into the kind of culture war politics that seems to pervade the US, where lines drawn in the sand turn into concrete barriers topped with razor wire.

I share that fear, but place the ultimate blame for that squarely on the current Conservative party. To me, it seems they are deliberately and happily adopting the Republican political playbook. And I don't like it one bit. We have our own way of conducting rancorous politics. I do not want to see our politics 'Americanized.'

 

[bit_pattern]

And in another example of conservatives trying to capture back ground lost to the deniers who have infiltrated conservatism, Kerry Emmanuel calls out Lindzen as a self-confessed liar who should be prosecuted for lying to Congress, and calls out "climategate" for what it is; “the latest in a series of coordinated, politically motivated attacks that represent an aggravated assault on scholarship”.

http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/20/kerry-emanuel-climategate-richard-lindzen/

 

[bit_pattern]

There is too much advertising money being spent on denial for it to go away.

$1.5 million from Exxon in 2009 alone.

http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/20/exxonmobil-funds-global-warming-deniers/

 

[Horatius]

.... and that lions emerge from the sand when the sun sets on the outgoing tide.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but......cite?

 

[Captain.Sassy]

I'm almost afraid to ask, but......cite?

At some point when I was a kid I read about various theories of abiogenesis, and some were very specific about the precise conditions that would give rise to various animals.

This is just a parody of abiogenesis type theories:

"Wherever there was suitable soil, moisture, and warmth the semina produced
wombs (uteri) rooted in the earth. Inside these wombs the first embryonic
animals and humans developed until they were ready to emerge, at which
point the wombs shelteringt hem broke open, releasing their inhabitants.O nce
free, these primordial creatures, which naturally found themselves without parents, were nourished by a milk-like substance that was produced by the soil itself and exuded through pores in the ground.'0 This, Lucretius says, is how the first animals arose, and he is quite explicit that the first humans were produced in exactly the same fashion."

Atomism, Atheism, and the Spontaneous Generation of Human Beings: The Debate over a Natural Origin of the First Humans in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Author(s): Matthew R. Goodrum
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 207-224



"As part of his overall attempt to give natural explanations of things that had previously been ascribed to the agency of the gods, Anaximander believed that everything arose out of the elemental nature of the universe, which he called the "apeiron" or "unbounded". According to Hippolytus in the third century CE, Anaximander claimed that living creatures were first formed in the "wet" when acted on by the Sun, and that they were different then than they are now. For example, he claimed humans, in a different form, must have earlier been born mature like other animals, or they would not have survived. Anaximander also claimed that spontaneous generation continued to this day, with aquatic forms being produced directly from lifeless matter.[3]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation