The Sky, She Is Falling
Al Gore != the Scientific Community
A friend of mine who fashions himself a skeptic IMed me the other day with a link to a Boston Globe article about global warming. He prefaced it by saying, “maybe the sky isn’t falling [sic]“. Maybe it isn’t, but author Jeff Jacoby obfuscates any credible skepticism behind an unfortunately common and lazy tactic of hyperbole and artificial polarization.
Jacoby lays out his twine and straw early, but it’s not until the second paragraph that we see his straw man erected. If your goal is to elucidate rather than proselytize, there’s no need to transform projections that 2007 would have been “warmest on record” into proclamations of a “planetary hot flash.” The connotation is diminutive and obvious. If you intend to subvert earnest concerns, at least put some effort into appearing similarly earnest.
My real beef, though, is with his seventh paragraph.
Now all of these [instances of surprisingly cold weather] may be
short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global
climatic warming that all gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the
deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have
caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of
global cooling?
The sad thing is, Jacoby neatly tucks reason away behind his own alarmist hand-waving; we may very well be facing not so much global warming, but either global cooling or, more interestingly, less montonic changes to the dynamics of global weather, including both cooling and warming. Ad hominem attacks on the body of scientists and their of global warming dynamics serve only to distract readers from any kernel of truth you might unwarily be peddling, Jeff. Further, while Al Gore is quite the (s)trumpet of eco-friendliness, he is not, in fact, a member nor an actual representative of the scientific community. Kicking people off Al Gore’s wagon may be more beneficial than you realize, but is, at best, tangential to the core issue: are analyses of these data as demonstrably clear as have been popularly expressed?
Optimistically, this “article” serves merely as a rough bibliography and link dump. In the future, the editorial staff at the Globe might better serve their readership by stripping all exposition from Jacoby’s pieces, leaving only the pointers to other sources of information.
How’s that for an ad hominem?
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