Good link for that post on series. I must say, is there anyone out there who can figure out the labyrinthine minds of those who work in marketing? Many of their decisions seem to make no sense whatsoever.

Just added my own little rant on that topic to the original post. Never mind "First thing we do, let's shoot all the lawyers"... I want the MBAs and Marketing/Sales f*ckwits to be First Up Against The Wall...

From the ice shelf article:

> Scientists are investigating the causes for the breakups and
> whether it is linked to global climate change.

Which means that it may not be linked to global warming climate change after all. (Maybe the breakup happened because the Wilkins Ice Shelf's just not that into Antarctica?) But true believers in the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change don't need to wait for actual science before attributing events to God Global Warming Climate Change.

Edited at 2009-04-04 11:52 pm (UTC)

To be serious for a moment, I don't actually care whether it's anthropogenic or a natural process. Either way the risks are enormous. That's where my real beef with global warming denial is -- it seems to translate to "la la la, I can't hear you", confusing denial of cause with denial of effect.

> To be serious for a moment, I don't actually care whether it's
> anthropogenic or a natural process.

Actually, you do. Because if the warming were completely the result of natural process and human activity had nothing to do with it, then all the proposed remedies involving cutting greenhouse gas emissions would be useless, while causing tremendous economic harm.

Most knowledgeable people who are labeled "global warming denialists" will agree that the earth has warmed over the last century. They may believe that the warming has been exaggerated somewhat by biased readings (for example, urban heat island effects may not have been properly accounted for), but they don't deny that there has been warming.

Furthermore, they will agree that humans caused some part of the warming through the emission of greenhouse gases.

Where the serious denial comes in is on the question of how fast and how bad future warming will be. In order to produce the disaster scenarios that alarmists love to promote, the climate models have to assume runaway positive feedback in the climate, but the data over the past 20 years does not support that assumption.

Without the runaway feedback effects (and assuming no major change in the natural cycles), warming during this century will be about the same as it was during the last century -- which was hardly apocalyptic. Under some analyses, the warming will have a net positive effect.

Imagine for a moment that warnings of a global warming apocalypse were being used by evangelical Christians to promote the idea that humanity needed to repent of its sinful ways, and that every time something happened that indicated warming in some area of the world, evangelical Christians used it as evidence that their predicted apocalypse was on the way, but they dismissed any cooling as merely random weather. And imagine that the majority of climate scientists doing research on global warming were evangelical Christians who had a strong desire to find evidence of the global warming apocalypse so they could try to convince humanity to repent.

If that were the case, what do you think would be the odds that you would be a skeptic about global warming? Wouldn't you at the very least have some concerns about bias in the data?

Now replace "evangelical Christian" with "environmentalist" in that scenario.