Climate change deniers depend on attacking evidence of human forced global warming and associated climate change in isolation, it’s such a complex issue that there is plenty of room to drive wedges and create “doubt” that has been for years and continues to be used to prevent any meaningful action on a growing crisis that has already killed, injured, made homeless or unemployed millions of people worldwide.
Because global warming denial depends on finding the vulnerable points to attack, it becomes important to not deal with it in isolation but to present the pattern of attack itself. Then it become more than apparent that what’s being done has nothing to do with effectively communicating essential information and has everything to do with the prevention of essential action in the interests of us all.
So let’s examine the pattern of denial of the climate change contrarian here;
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/forums/viewthread/18065/
At the very start of the discussion of climate change models:
Mike posts-
What Dana is talking about is that all the models are showing the earth is warming. But when you look at the charts, the charts show the models disagree by 1.75. And when you are trying to keep warming under 2. That not a good enough system. Once you get the NASA, NOAA and UK Hadley Centre agreeing, then you got something.Kind of nebulous, but the intent here isn't to provide meaningful information, it's to distort, confuse and eventually neutralize it to the greatest degree possible in the interests of one narrow commercial sector of our society.
What we have is the public, media, political, scientists and none-scientists all with a points of views. Who I am backing is the scientists. The ones working on the computer models. The political groups has gotten the public groups all worked up so they can start taxing them. The none-scientists and media are writing stories and trying to get a piece of the money pie. Meanwhile the scientists are working with the models and building the data gathering systems. I’m backing the scientists all the way. Where we disagree is. Absolute perfection, I don’t see that. Destructive to our way of life. I do see that happening a little bit. Our way of life changes from generation to generation in the industrialized nations now. Remember, the super volcano is much more dangerous to mankind’s existence and way of life than climate change. What are we doing to monitor the super volcanoes that we know of? How come we aren’t setting up computer models and taxing people for funding to build systems to handle the volcanoes? I bet if Al Gore and the carbon credit group could have figured out a way to make money on the volcanoes, we would be talking volcano instead of climate. We do know that mankind has survived the 20 climate changes. But the one super volcano in mankind’s existence just about wiped us out. One DNA result showed only 500 people left on earth. The best we can do, will be done by the proper use of knowledge.He's on the side of scientists, but then he contradicts that by dismissing the evidence that has the highest degree of confidence and throws out a red herring that we should be really afraid of. "Don't worry about carbon dioxide forcing catastrophic climate change everybody, those super volcanoes are much more frightening. Then goes onto comparing monitoring human forced climate change with monitoring super volcanoes, if we're not going to pay attention to something much worse than climate change then what's the big deal with burning billions of tons of fossil fuels a year is the idea he's putting across. Remember that one of the founders of the modern contrarian movement former credible scientist Fred Seitz did exactly the same thing for the tobacco industry. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/manufactured-ignorance
Frederick Seitz, for example, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and ex officio member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, in 1979 was hired by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, makers of Camel cigarettes, to head their Medical Research Committee. A solid-state physicist with Manhattan Project credentials, Seitz was assigned the task of handing out $45 million in research grants to buttress the prestige of tobacco—grants that, as he would later admit, steered clear of anything that might impugn tobacco. “They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking," he said in a 2006 interview. Seitz was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the six years during which he served in this capacity. It was not long thereafter that he and a crew of Cold Warrior colleagues also began denying the reality of human-caused climate change.He directed $45 million dollars from the tobacco lobby to do studies on the effects of anything but cancer while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lying for living has never paid better, the fossil fuel sector has far more money to spend on this than the tobacco lobby ever did. Mike again;
Citizen, sorry for not getting back right away. I need another day. Went to the U-tube to watch the video and spent 3 hours there. Mostly with the guy Pothole54 that you put in your post. What a great guy and the skills of communication are the greatest. Thank you, MikeThen he gets folksy like he really is just one of us...until it's time to get back to the denial side of things. Where it shifts to appeal to authority over evidence and what a physicist is telling us where we should be in the glacial/inter-glacial cycles. To be clear, they're all different as the Milankovitch Cycles involve a complex interplay of three mechanisms. Orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precession, so nobody knows exactly where we are in regards to this cycle...except for global warming deniers who apparently have access to higher levels of enlightenment when it comes to shutting down crucial discussion.
Ok, where does the physics tell us where is the earth located at in the natural climate cycle? My understanding is that Ruddiman is saying that we should be in an Ice Age now. It is understood and not contested that the cycle takes 90,000 years to warm the earth, but only 10,000 years for the cooling process. Forget for right now the global warming and climate change and agree where the earth is located in the natural cycle. Then add the global warming and climate change. Are we headed to the peak of the warming cycle? At the peak of the warming cycle? Over the peak of the warming cycle and are now in the cooling cycle? Ruddiman is saying that we are over the peak and should be in the normal Ice Age if it wasn’t for the global warming affect.In the end it's all bullshit, "people" like this aren't here to discuss anything in good faith, if this poster was he wouldn't be presenting utter garbage such as ice core records that indicate levels of CO2 300 times current rates, not just once but several times even when corrected with the actual levels which never went above 290 ppm of CO2. This is just a start, I think if somebody is willing to screw with all our lives and futures this way, then it's up to us to shine a bright light on their activities. Please feel free to add to this as this campaign of denial continues here and many other places.