Part of a sentence in a story in one of the nation’s leading newspapers speaks volumes about what’s wrong with the media, with established science, with public discourse, with government policy-making:
“parts of the country are experiencing increasing severe weather events and pest invasions, which scientists have tied to the affects of climate change”
No source given, of course, for “scientists”, as is the common habit nowadays in what passes for journalism.
As everyone knows, “climate change” in common contemporary usage means “climate change brought on by human activities, in particular generation of carbon dioxide”.
As everyone should know, there’s not a shred of reputable evidence to support the view that human activities are responsible for the historically inevitable increase in global temperatures, eventually by about 5-6°C over the next 100,000 years or so, as Earth rebounds from the last Ice Age (A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?; Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland, 2012: 18-26).
Nor is there a shred of reputable evidence to support the increasingly common assertion that rising temperatures are associated with an increased frequency of “unusual” climatic events.
The story’s header is “White House to unveil ‘climate hubs’ to aid farmers across country” (David Nakamura, Washington Post, 5 February 2014), illustrating how our government has swallowed the Big Lie pushed by a small proportion of self-interested careerist “scientists”, who have even managed to divert attention from the fact that their vaunted computer models have been wrong for the last 15 years or so — “Climate Scientist: 73 UN climate models wrong, no global warming in 17 years”; note also “NASA study proves CO2 cools atmosphere”.
I relished the “affects” instead of the presumably intended “effects”, since it reminds that all the bullshit * about “climate change” is a matter of emotions (affects) and not facts or good objective science. If it’s a typo, it illustrates the lack of good editing at a leading newspaper. If it is the author’s mistake, it illustrates the condition of our education system.
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* Bullshit is now a perfectly respectable as well as useful term, thanks to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005. He defines it as assertions made without regard to whether or not they have any truth value, a very apt description of public shibboleths about global warming, HIV/AIDS, and any number of other topics where hordes of people, including journalists and public pundits, say things without thinking about them or actually knowing anything about them other than that “everyone knows” them; and “what everyone knows” is just what “authorities” have told them, authorities who understand that “Saying so, makes it so” (big file, loads slowly, sorry).
Skepticism about science and medicine 