"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Ouch!

Dr. Lubos links to an amazingly painful Larry King snippet and scores some easy points. Brace yourself.

In short, Bill Nye the science guy sputters a bit and then makes the usual blunder about the "Gulf Stream shutting down", and Lindzen makes plenty of hay from it.

If this is the story people are seeing, is it any wonder they are getting it jumbled up?

Larry King's people deserve some of the blame for this disaster, but Bill Nye should have just demurred. We don't need some bowtied Mr Rogers clone defending us, for God's sake. It may not be "a hundred thousand to one" as Nye idiotically suggests but it's pretty much "ten thousand to ten". Where were the ten thousand? Couldn't King's people have found even one competent member of the IPCC?

It's bad enough to have to debate on these terms, but it seems we have to. If we don't, they will put up the likes of Bill Nye to argue our case!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If it's really 10,000 to 10, why do you proponents of A.G.W. write and complain about "skeptics" so much? By the way, since there's such a "consensus" about anthropogenic global warming, why don't you simply take an honest poll of credentialed scientists and prove it to the world? Constantly crying about Dr. Lindzen and other "skeptics" only makes me wonder why your scientific orthodoxy can't just stand on it's own merits. Ad hominem attacks on anyone who disagrees with A.G.W. does little for your cause.

Michael Tobis said...

If it's really 10,000 to 10, why do you proponents of A.G.W. write and complain about "skeptics" so much?

Because they get at least half the press, and being on the whole communication specialists rather than scientists, they do a better job with the attention they get.

I am not a "proponent" of AGW. I am a proponent in my professional capacity of the proposition that the IPCC WGI report does fairly represent the opinions of the scientific community. As an earthling I am a proponent of the idea that this consensus is consequential.

why don't you simply take an honest poll of credentialed scientists and prove it to the world?


The Oreskes study
is probably germane to your request.

So is this Wikipedia article.

Ad hominem attacks on anyone who disagrees with A.G.W. does little for your cause.

I agree that being confrontational in any way is unhelpful.

However you use "AGW" in a strange way that doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that you are treating it as a hypothesis that is either true or false. I am not entirely sure what you mean, so I am not even sure whether I "agree" or "disagree" with it.

I hope you find my reply helpful and grounds for reconsidering your rather hostile stance.