Maggie's team of lawyers might be receiving a court-ordered injunction any minute now. I suppose you heard how word rapidly spread throughout the blogosphere that a blogger was daring to ask for the readers' opinions before making his post, and there are obviously a lot of people out there who are mighty uncomfortable with this heretical notion and want it nipped in the bud. "The good citizens of America shouldn't be allowed to witness such poisonous ideas," claimed one high-profile blogger. "There ought to be a law!"
Anyway, despite the government's threat to seize Bird Dog's house as collateral against the impending law suits for the 'moral aggrievature' and 'mental discombobulance' this has caused, I'm going to courageously plunder on. I figure if I'm brave enough to risk Bird Dog's home, then he should be too.
To recap, in case you didn't read the above link, the article I'm writing addresses the three types of global warming 'deniers' out there:
— Those who deny the earth is warming through natural means
— Those who deny that warming is a good thing
— Those who deny the earth is warming at all
Also, I keep reading articles that either mention a whole bunch of now-disproved AGW items, but don't actually explain why they were discredited, or articles that elaborate at great length on a few items, whereas a tidy encapsulation would do. And no article I've seen attempts to cover the whole spectrum of bullet points, tidy encapsulations and all.
So it was left for me to do the dirty deed.
However...
By no means do I claim to be any kind of climatologist, just a humble scribe (see accompanying photo) passing along what I've picked up over the years. I might very well be missing some critical aspect of a juicy trope, or, worse, missing one altogether. That's where you come in. My main goal here is to cover every topic the AGW community has hauled out over the years and get 'em all in one package. I had mostly done that when I started this daring (if heretical) experiment.
Then along came Bronson. Ted, that is, who suggested I give credit where credit is due and highlight the groups who are getting rich (monetarily or politically) off this delicious scheme, and that reminded me of the consequences of their actions, and how I hadn't elaborated on my prior usage of the word criminal in the article.
Below the fold, I have now done so.
Update: Jerry left a comment in a different thread and mentioned the "record-breaking" storms (rain, snow, hail, molten lava) that are continually decimating entire populations due to your neighbor's SUV, so I also covered that.
What prompted Jerry's remark was this eye-catching headline I had posted:
Historic October Snowstorm To Hammer Northeast
Historic! Yikes! I guess those global warming climate change people were right!
And, of course, the article never mentions anything more about just why it's 'historic', so you look around the page and finally dig up a "Rarity of October Snow" link and there, down in paragraph #498, is the last time there was such an early snowfall in the area:
1979.
Historic!
Update 2: Hot Air came out with an article yesterday that reminded me of another aspect to cover. It's so seductive that Bird Dog couldn't stop himself from posting it in the morning links, but, as I'll point out, there simply couldn't be a worse strategy.
The full draft of my article is here. Below is what I added.
Record-breaking Records
It would be fun to plot a graph of all the times terms like "historic" and "record-breaking" have been used in weather-related articles over the past 30 years, then watch how it started to spike in the early 2000's when AGW came of age. It's a classic, and effective, tactic. The only thing they're leaving out is from when.
Usually, the last 20 to 50 years. Just long enough so that it seems like some kind of 'record' has been set, and thus 'broken'. "Hot August 15th Breaks Record — Local Scientist Blames Global Warming!" screams the Blatfield Daily News. Then, down in paragraph #23, it notes that the previous Blatfield record for August 15th was in 1975. Before that, 1931. Before that, 1893. Record-breakers, the lot of them. The bottom line is that somewhere in the world a weather record is 'broken' every single day of the year.
Along the same lines is the general spin any good writer can put on an article, and especially with selected quotes. "Yep, this here global warmin' will prob'ly decimate our crops, starvin' mah whole family to deeth," said local farmer Ernest Sawback. See and hear "will probably" enough times and eventually it just becomes will.
But getting back to our theme, we should expect to see more and more records being broken, but only from a geologic point of view. Let's look at decades, rather than years. Over the next 50 decades, the average temperature of each decade will slowly rise, with dips where it cools a bit below average, and spots where it rises above, but the overall line we draw through them all will be a gradual rise culminating in Greenland's rebirth as a nation.
Driving Forces
The reason it's so hard to fight the AGW movement is because it's widely divided into three camps, and without much overlap.
In one corner are the 'pure' environmentalists; meaning, there's nothing political or monetary in their actions. They're just doing it for good ol' Ma Earth and Auntie Gaia. This could generally be broken down into the people who have been convinced by the 'science' of AGW, and those who just buy it because that's what the media says. Imagine how many people out there believe it's true and have never read a single article on it. Not in the paper, not online. See it on the TV news, read the same headlines year after year, and there's simply no reason to.
And then there are the capitalists. Ironically, the usual term bandied about is socialist, but that's misleading because most of what's going on today, such as carbon offset trading, is nothing but sheer, raw capitalism in its purest form.
Where the 'socialism' angle comes up is in regards to Africa and the bucketloads of money being poured into it, but, again, it's just a means to a monetary end. If they actually cared about the people, they'd be sending tangible goods and engineers, not depositing a big check in the local king's Swiss bank account. I've seen estimates that 90% of it is gone by the time it hits the street. If these people were actual Socialists, such shenanigans would not be tolerated.
And then you have the ideologues who believe it simply because it's part of the Democratic Platform. These are the people least likely to be reading an article like this, because the last thing they want is to be shown their vaunted party could be wrong on any issue, much less this one. They'll sound like 'concerned environmentalists' in their passionate screeds, but their ultimate goal is scaring people into voting Democratic. I suppose the obvious tip-off would be the usage of the word Republicans in the article. If their ultimate goal is political, they'll have to name the enemy at least once.
So that's the problem.
On one hand, you have ardent believers for whatever reason, and on the other you have people who might very well know it's all bullshit, but the actual truth is irrelevant when faced against political power or the almighty dollar.
And the money people are going to be extremely tough to even slow down, much less stop. If you've heard of the Euros wanting to impose a carbon tax on the international airlines, then you know this nice little revenue generator is doing nothing but gaining steam. And since everybody makes money on these carbon credit deals — since there's zero expenditure, outlay or risk — they're not going to want to slow it down for any reason, and will fight any effort to do so tooth and nail — and the legal equivalents thereof.
The Travesties
This isn't just a case of "Oh, those crazy AGW kooks are at it again!" There are serious consequences to their actions.
That is, if you call entire nations being destroyed a 'consequence'.
The island nations in the South Seas have now been officially informed by the U.N. that, indeed, their low-lying islands are soon be lost to the ever-rising seas due to the melting ice caps, and they'd better start making evacuation plans.
That is, if you consider a personal visit by the United Nations Secretary-General as 'official'.
As such, they're now abandoning long-term plans for their respective nations. They're starting to make moving plans. These nations' futures are being destroyed by a hoax.
When I used the word 'criminal' in the preface to this article, this was one of the things I was thinking of, as is the following.
And then there are those poor bastards in Africa. As mind-boggling as it sounds, African nations are being paid billions of dollars a year not to develop such planet-killing evils as coal-burning electrical plants. Future historians will probably refer to this era as "when insanity ran amok".
And you just know all kinds of pockets are being lined along the way. After all, the money was contributed by rich nations, so it's easy to be free with it and spread it around, all the while siphoning off a tiny bit at every step.
I address the following to the people perpetrating this crime against humanity:
Before you say, "Oh, it's Africa — they're used to such hardship!", there's a point to be made here.
Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. No need to kill or die for. And no religions, too.
Got the picture?
Strip away all boundaries and convictions and just view every person on the planet from a humanistic point of view for once in your life.
Denying this part of humanity electricity is keeping them in the literal Dark Ages. It's not just that you're keeping them a century back. You're keeping them centuries back.
You should not want that on your tombstone.
Framing The Debate
The single biggest pit that our side falls into is the "It hasn't warmed in 10 years!" claim, which is identical to the "record-breaking!" silliness. Who refers to years when dealing with climate on a global scale?
Not to single it out, but a recent article on Hot Air was titled:
Surprise! No warming in last 11 years
In other words, if suddenly the earth actually does warm up over the next few decades, then man-made global warming is real? Framing the argument that way is a horrific error in logic, destined to lose, and yet you see it everywhere. Anthony Watts over at Watts Up does it, Tom Harris at Climate Science does it, Doug Ross at Daily Bayonet does it, and now here's Ed Morrissey of Hot Air doing it. Regardless of what he then goes on to say in the article, he's now framed the debate that way. As long as the global temperature doesn't go up, then AGW is a hoax.
As long as.
As I hope I've shown, the only way to debate this issue is to quickly agree that the earth is warming in general, then bring up whether or not it's man-made, then point to the geological record. Anyone still arguing at that point isn't worth the time or trouble. They either have an agenda to fulfill or they're outright zealots, and either way they're not going to be shaken from their anointed path by mere words and graphs.
