Wednesday, November 29, 2006

And THESE people are in charge of our climate change program?


Just when you think it's not physically possible for the Blogging Tories to get any denser as a collective, well, they can still surprise you. Take, for example, "Conservative Life," who blogs on global warming but without taking the time to actually understand it 'cuz that would be, you know, hard work:

How come whenever we have a hot summer day I have to endure listening to leftist proclaim that the sky is falling. But when Alberta is experiencing its coldest spell in 100 years I find out about it on an American news source.

Apparently, on CL's planet, a nasty cold spell is all that's necessary to make fun of that whole "global warming" silliness. Just as apparently, CL has never taken the time to figure out that one of the proposed consequences of global warming is more frequent weather extremes, as Tim Thompson explains here:

... let me point out that global warming is a globally averaged phenomenon. That means that some places will get colder, while some places get warmer, with the global average getting warmer. Furthermore, there are obvious & well known cycles in nature, and no doubt others that are not obvious & not known (yet) ... I think the overall effect of global warming is most easily seen in the extremes; cold places get colder, warm places get warmer, and where the coldest & warmest places are will change as air mass motions change. But there are significant effects in nature, from feedback between oceans & atmosphere, to unexpected solar cycles, all of which need to be studied & understood.

But one need not take Thompson's word for anything. You can take the time to do an online search for some combination of "global warming" and "weather extremes" to see for yourself. Or you can become a member of the Blogging Tories and stay stupid.

The choice is entirely up to you.

LIES, DAMNED LIES AND WANKER STATISTICS
. It's always amusing (and a bit painful) to watch the residents of Wankerville twist themselves inside out to ignore what the rest of us would see as obvious statistical trends. Take, for instance, this graph of the U.S. deficit (explained here):



Now, you and I (our fundamental properties being that we are not clinically insane) would look at that graph and think, "Hmmmmm ... I see a definite pattern here."

Your typical wanker, on the other hand (based on his views on global warming), would look at the same graph and proclaim, "Well, see, there's that increase in 1997 when Clinton was president so we really can't say anything about trends, can we? So there."

And that's when having a quiet conversation with your cat suddenly seems intellectual by comparison.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are there also supposed to be greater extremes between hot and cold within a particular zone?

Here in Southern Ontario, we get these isolated, raw cold winter days, followed by unseasonable warmth. Plus summer days that are like walking in a sauna.

It seems to me that given the magnitude of the potential crisis and the prevalence of scientific opinion, even a skeptic ought to want to avoid the problem.

Unless they're mindless cretins in thrall to oil industry shills that is.

Anonymous said...

Hey, CC, I clicked on your "Conservative Life" link and got this:

We have identified that you have been refered (sic) here by a known or supposed spammer.

Way to go: you got us ALL banned!

Anonymous said...

Then turn off the 'referer' in your browser. You can do that in Firefox by going into about:config and change the network.http.sendRefererHeader to the value of 0 (zero). If you're using Internet Exploder, well, it sucks to be you.