Really awesome.
Iâm glad someone took the time to do this, but I have to say Iâm not optimistic about it doing a lot of good. Denialists are generally not likely to be convinced of anything they donât want to believe by empirical evidence, and, in my experience, are prone to simply repeating a lie louder when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that itâs false.
i hope it is a really thick handbook, i know a few people that need to be whacked over the head with it.
Is there one of these for the anti-vaccine crazies!!!
Itâs not about convincing denialists - itâs about preventing them from fooling the unwary, about clearing the intentional obfuscation and âdoubt factoryâ strategy that they use to continue The Great Despair.
i wouldnât be so sanguine about this. this article talks about how science education typically gives people better tools for fitting information into their worldviewâ
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/05/science-education-wont-solve-climate-change
this article discusses how the phrasing of the ipccâs reports muddies the waters about climate changeâ
and this is a link to a chemistry blog i read and their reaction to both climate change the âclimategateâ controversy from a few years ago. if you read through both the post and the comments, you can see that a group of people with a great deal of scientific education consider climate science junk science on a par with homeopathy and that the scientists who wrote the emails should all have been firedâ
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/12/01/climategate_and_scientific_conduct.php
all of which makes me less than hopeful that this will do much good but more power to them.
I was raised by my grandfather and Iâve learned many great values from him that I carry with me. I am thankful for having him in my life. He also happens to be a climate change denier. He watches Fox News every night like its his religion. Sometimes itâs hard to keep my mouth shut when I hear him spouting off false information about the climate but then I think to myself whatâs the point? Can you really change an old man from his ways? All I want to do is have a beer with him and talk about airplanes. As long as politics donât come up itâs all fine and dandy. Itâs sad because itâs my generation who has to deal with all this shit.
Sad to admit, but the simian from outer space has it right.
I was listening today to an NPR story about the Texas State Board of Education, and how they insist the Founding Fathers were influenced by, among the standard philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers, Moses.
I donât mean to insult any Texans, but the Texas Board of Education sounds like ground zero for budding climate deniers. When someone spends their entire formative years with wrong ideas, itâs really hard to get them to step back and accept change.
Try this short one by Avicenna: http://freethoughtblogs.com/amilliongods/2012/11/26/immunity-easy-peasy-lemon-squeezie/
Well, that and the fact we already hit some of the major tipping points a decade ago. Even if we did everything possible right now, we would still have a minimum 2-degree Celsius rise by 2050. Given the glacial rate of response thus far I have to assume that we are, on the whole, pretty much already fucked. The best we can really hope for at this point is simply survival of the human race. Iâll be dead before the shit really hits the fan, but I do feel sorry for the next few generations surviving the transitionâŚ
The concern I have is about the return of the ice-age, something which seems to happen on a relatively short timescale; the entire northeast of North America, features such as Cape Cod, are all products of the receding ice sheet which covered everything down to Boston just 16 to 20 thousand years ago. The ice ages seem to come in 50-thousand year cycles, and they are far more devastating than the small temperature rises predicted by current climate change models.
If we can prevent the next ice age, I think that is the most important goal for Western civilization.
Have you considered stopping the tide?
Remember there are two kinds of deniers. Some are professionals, who know theyâre lying and are paid to lie and they were probably tobacco defenders 10 years ago. If the paycheck is juicy, some people will deliver any message at all.
Most of them are folks who just love to troll liberals. They donât really care if the arctic wilderness gets exploited - they just love watching other people get mad when they say, âdrill, baby, drill.â Just like Philadelphia will always have a few Cowboys fans - just to get a reaction.
Not touching the rest of it, but this was unique to me. Youâre saying that the most devastating thing for the planet is a hypothetical future ice ageâŚbut only the Western world should fight it and be saved. You do know the planet is round, not flat, right? (Thatâs not a rhetorical question: denialism in general has a tendency to run deep in many people.)
Iâm aware of the contrarian contingent, but I donât think theyâre any more likely to listen to reason.
From almost three years ago, so itâs probably obsolete.
Carbon emissions âwill defer Ice Ageâ
In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not.
âAt current levels of CO2, even if emissions stopped now weâd probably have a long interglacial duration determined by whatever long-term processes could kick in and bring [atmospheric] CO2 down,â said Luke Skinner from Cambridge University.
Dr Skinnerâs group - which also included scientists from University College London, the University of Florida and Norwayâs Bergen University - calculates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin.
Youâll have to use your google-fu to actually read the letter, though.
And from this year
⌠The next 20 kyr will have an abnormally high greenhouse effect which, according to the CO2 values, will lengthen the present interglacial by some 25 to 33 kyr. This is because the perturbation of the current interglacial will lead to a delay in the future advance of the ice sheet on the Antarctic shelf, causing that the relative maximum of boreal insolation found 65 kyr after present (AP) will not affect the developing glaciation. Instead, it will be the following insolation peak, about 110 kyr AP, which will find an appropriate climatic state to trigger the next deglaciation.
Really interesting; thanks for finding those links.
Normally I wouldnât bother with a garden-variety denier, but the phrase âWestern civilizationâ hit me. I wonder how many of them have this same bias as part of their belief system.
I see, so itâs really interesting that we might be able to prevent an ice age which is, in geological terms, about to happen in the blink of an eye, , e.g., a mile of ice covering Boston, within 1500 years, but a few degrees of warming is a world-ending disaster?
