Divide and conquer is a time honoured strategy. Manmade climate change deniers often cherry pick isolated facts or pieces of evidence to create or bolster their deceptions. They rely upon the short attention span/sound-bite media world we live in to make their case. They shamelessly re-use demolished arguments and misrepresented research because they know that the general public has a short memory and if they just repackage the same ideas in different wording, to put a different spin it, they will get away with it with a large number of casual observers.
Illustrative of this is the “weather versus climate” meme whereby for example the delusionists will shout out that Smalltown, Pennsylvania has the coldest/deepest temperatures/snow since the oldest resident can remember and therefore how can the Earth be warming up? Clearly all those thousands of scientists must be wrong! This meme relies upon the short memories or insular focus of too many who are just not that aware of, or care, what is happening elsewhere apart from in their own backyards.
We had an unusual pretty cold snowy patch before Christmas in Jersey but that didn’t mean that the Earth was cooling, did it? It meant only that the UK was having a cold snap. Now, we in Jersey are having a prolonged period of high temperatures and virtually non-existent rainfall. That does not mean that the Earth is warming up. No one event, no matter how dramatic, can prove a statistical trend. However, if one adds up all the unusual events like this across the whole world and starts to see a trend of unusual events happening – like two once-in-a-hundred-years floods/droughts/tornadoes etc. happening within five years - then the truly intelligent should start to question whether there is something globally unusual going on.
The video below -
“A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never.”
- is a stunning narration-with-pictures of a recent Washington Post op-ed by Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org. Bill’s organisation campaigns that the most sensible thing to do is to reduce current atmospheric CO2 levels (390'ish ppm) to 350 or below in order to give us the best chance of avoiding the worst that could happen. The video below is narrated and illustrated by Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia.com
Caution: for those who have irony/intelligence bypasses (far too many people in Jersey...) the style of narration is IRONIC. He is PARODYING the deniers and showing just how blisteringly stupid, ignorant and destructive they are. He constantly tells you not to make connections between the frequency of extreme weather events happening now and climate change predictions. He tells you not to notice any patterns and not to connect each separate event. In short he suggests that burying your ostrich heads in the sand is the most comforting way to react.
In addition to the events mentioned by Bill, here’s a few more from a comment on “Climate Crock of the Week” Peter Sinclair’s blog. Peter was generally praising the video and started out by saying “damn, I wish I’d done this”.
Comment by otter17: “Also, there is no need to worry about the Larsen B ice shelf collapse, the Manhattan-sized iceberg falling off of Greenland, the near-unanimous melting of glaciers worldwide, the coastal flooding in Brazil in 2010, the increased frequency of European heatwaves this past decade, the changing growing seasons, the coral bleaching events, the Yangtze River basin drought in China, the prolonged low water levels in Hoover Dam’s reservoir Lake Mead, the Missouri River flooding this year, the recent decade’s spike in Atlantic tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes, the increase in El Niño events over the past several decades, the sinkholes and ponds developing from melting permafrost in the Arctic and Subarctic, the methane bubbling up above the vast methane clathrate reservoirs north of Siberia, etc.
Yeah, don’t bother with those events either. And certainly don’t connect the dots with the rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions or the hockey stick temperature graph”
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