Fox News Accuses All Climate Scientists of Corruption
Some days, I’m proud to be an American. Other days, I come across stuff like this piece on climate change, and I want to try to find a rock to crawl under.
Obviously, antics like this piece from Fox News, accusing all climate scientists of corruption, are theater rather than news, but that doesn’t make them any less embarrassing to our country.
H. L. Mencken said 80 years ago, “no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” But isn’t there a limit? Isn’t there anything these people at Fox won’t do for money?
Craig, I’m with Brian Kilmeade on this one. There’s no question that the vast majority of “scientists” (ranging anywhere from college Juniors to PhD candidate ‘perpetual students’) are employed by colleges and universities, where liberal/leftist thinking prevails. The left is always against the actions of American industrial corporations; remember the first “Earth Day” at Penn Charter? We were told then that the earth was going to freeze over. Two years ago we found out that the Univ. East Anglia was fabricating data and concealing facts. It’s pretty cold here today, by the way. How’s things in California?
OBViously you’re with Brian Kilmeade, Duke; that goes without saying, given your extreme right-wing politics. But I would think this would go beyond the pale even for you. Does the idea that our scientists have formed a massive, covert conspiracy to deceive and cheat us seem even remotely credible?
Here’s a piece I wrote on (super-capitalist) Jeremy Grantham’s viewpoint on climate change that I hope will shine some light on this: http://2greenenergy.com/global-warming-4/8683/.
Things are fine out here, btw; thanks.
Here’s a better link to Grantham’s writing on the subject:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/07/grantham-everything-you-need-to-know-about-global-warming-in-5-minutes/
Fox news has been given plenty of rope. This latest absurd position of theirs has probably resulted in their hanging themselves, at least in the minds of people who think.
When I was in high school, we studied propaganda techniques. Attempting to discredit people by calling them “leftist/liberals” is a well-known propaganda technique called name calling. It was especially common during the McCarthy era during which any proposal could be killed, regardless of its merits, but asserting that the “Godless communist Russians” favored similar ideas. Once a proposal or people have had a negative label attached to them, rational thinking ceases and proposals are no longer considered on their merits.
The idea that a cold spell disproves global warming is nonsense. We do not know exactly what all the effects of global warming will be; climate science has not advanced to that point and perhaps it never will. But it would be absurd to assume that global warming will be either geographically or seasonally uniform. Obviously it is possible for mean temperatures to increase even when temperatures are decreasing in certain areas or during certain times. Abnormal shrinking of glaciers in many places of the world would seem to indicate that global warming is actually occurring even if winters in some areas are sometimes colder than normal.
Of course one can find scientists who assert that global warming is fiction, just as at one time it was easy to find doctors who asserted that smoking was harmless. We can delay taking effective action to limit global warming until the proof becomes so clear that no one can deny it by which time the quality of life would become unacceptably degraded, or we can take effective action now. But we must take care that proposed action is actually practical, the technology is now available, and proposed remedies are politically possible. The public is more likely to deny global warming if the proposed remedies are unacceptably expensive or disruptive.
Duke, have you ever tried to form a consensus about anything with which 97% of the scientific community agree?
(statistic from Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 2010)
It is very hard to achieve this degree of consensus about anything without exceptionally strong evidence on your side.
Even with the strongest possible evidence, you usually have a few people disagreeing, all the more so within the scientific community and among liberal thinking groups who are often quite idealistic, and so more likely to tell the truth about a controversy as they see it without regard for the consequences.
In my view, the idea that such a high percentage of any group is corrupt, or more specifically that such a high percentage of scientists based in nearly every country and culture around the world would be prepared to compromise their scientific integrity for any reason (with the possible exception of a direct and immediate threat to their lives)strikes me as highly implausible to say the least. There are simply no global drivers for such a conspiracy applicable across so many cultures, places, languages and institutions.
I have not been able to open the link to the Fox piece to review its content in detail, so can only go by Craig’s comments, however if his analysis of the content is in any way accurate, I would say there is a significant chance that a group of climate scientists could take out a class action suit against Fox News in the High Court in London for slander!
If slander is proved, precedent would seem to indicate a court award in the millions of dollars plus costs and a court order to issue a retraction on air.