After my last global warming post, I discovered the deniers in the blogosphere and it got me thinking. About those who write that:
global warming is a left wing conspiracy or
that global warming does not exist or
the one that makes me laugh the hardest is the globe is cooling and their tag words will list global cooling. Hmm I should add that as a tag word.
All this got me to thinking why that is so. Usually I just wonder what the grandkids of global warming deniers are going to say to them. But this time I asked something more fundamental – why do they think the way they do?
Here are my top 6 reasons.
Reason No. 6
Global Warming Deniers don’t like to think. They may not know who George Bernard Shaw was (a great playwright and a Nobel Laureate) but they agree with what he said “Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.”
Reason No. 5
Global Warming Deniers hate to recycle. What, separate the paper from the food? What a funny notion.
Reason No. 4
Global Warming Deniers like to believe the advertisers. After all McDonalds does give you a 99cent burger when they advertise that special so when a coalition of big business says hey if business were to worry about global warming, your taxes will go up….they believe them.
Reason No. 3
Global Warming Deniers think to be right they have to be the opposite of left.
So they must believe the opposite of any thinking that is labeled left.
Reason No. 2
Global Warming Deniers are oil company investors. They love their dividends.
And The Top Reason
Global Warming Deniers saw lots of war movies when they were kids and they always wanted to be the guy who gets trapped and valiantly stands on his toes as water gushes into the room. The water rises, to his chin but he did not give up raising his gun above his hands.
So now they get to be the guys who will valiantly defend their right to consume without looking at or considering anything or anyone else. They know that climate scientists agree that rich countries will be hurt a lot less than the developing world as the oceans keep rising.
But if there is water in the streets and you own a large vehicle? Which brings us to the Real Reason No. 1
Global Warming Deniers want to feel good about owning their Hummers and hope one day, to look good in them
Anyone else has other reasons to add to this list?
Welcome to the world of Denialism! You should probably check out the Denialism blog (http://www.scienceblogs.com/Denialism) at some point – it’s the king of the skeptical web. Also the Skeptics’ Circle (http://skepticscircle.blogspot.com/) is a good place for you to submit a link to post like this, so you can get some traffic to your blog.
On the subject of conspiracy theorists, yes it puzzles me too (and many others in the rational blogosphere). There are lots of theories around, some researchers have even published peer-reviewed papers on the subject – I reviewed one at The Lay Scientist the other week (http://layscience.net/?q=node/142).
Anyway, good luck with the blogging, and you should definitely submit this post to the Skeptics’ Circle.
Martin
7) Global warming deniers believe in graphs:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/uah_may_08.png
Pwn’t
@Mick: Let’s look at the same graph in context:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Satellite_Temperatures.png
Not only does your graph actually show a warming trend (I notice you cunningly removed the trend-line), but of all the various different datasets available, you’ve cherry-picked the one with the lowest trend. Of course generally we wouldn’t use a dataset as short as 29 years either.
Scientists aren’t stupid. We’re not engaged in some kind of vast conspiracy. Any data that you’ve ever seen is also well-know to the science community since we were the ones who produced and published it. We’re well aware that it’s there, and we account for it in our work.
You see Mick, in science we don’t just pick out one piece of data and scan it by eye. We understand that there are many different ways of processing satellite data (which doesn’t actually directly measure temperature) which can influence the result you get. Therefore instead of relying on one single plot, we look at lots of data, processed in lots of different ways.
Thanks a lot Martin! I agree with what you said.
Cheers!