Re: [asa] Global Warming Stats

I've been traveling - sorry for the late reply.

On 5/26/08, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> As I've mentioned previously, I continue to be interested in this claim
> which one hears rather frequently. I think it may be true for casual,
> untested assumptions. However, I'm trying to collect examples in cases where
> the majority based its case on data that verified the specific theory in
> question. Surely there must be some. Any candidates?
>
> Randy
>

My reply: You may want to shoot an email off to Michael Crichton since he
claims to have at least some of the peer-reviewed info you're looking for:

Michael Crichton (excerpted): "So I can tell you some facts. I know you
haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because
newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a
carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned.
I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't
carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has
caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose
deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced
western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a
fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world.

Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century
history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people
around the world die and didn't give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and
never was, and the EPA has always known it.

I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its
proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area
that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%.

I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of
Antarctica is increasing.

I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that
there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon
dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear.

The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was
necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts
would be a waste of time.

They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies
existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I
can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in
the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature.

But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you,
because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are
matters of faith.

Unshakeable belief.

Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious
fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with
fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never
recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways
of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they
believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the
business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right
way.

They want to help you be saved.

They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view.
In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its
rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our
thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around
the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But
this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of
religion.

We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday
predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead. ..."

You may contact him for the peer-reviewed sources he referenced (and read
the rest of his commentary) at his web site here:
*Environmentalism as Religion
by Michael Crichton, San Francisco, September 15, 2003
*http://www.crichton-official.com/

Lynn

>
> Lynn quoted:
>
> "..In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was
> wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.
>
>
>

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Received on Wed May 28 12:50:15 2008