Gene Lyons asks "Why Do People Still Deny Climate Change?"
Look at the rhetorical sleight of hand here. The title "Why do people still deny climate change?" Then basically, there's been bad weather so it's high time we take "global warming" 'seriously'. And then a litany of bad weather events to "support" the idea that man is causing all of this. Yeah. There's never been floods and plagues and droughts before the industrial revolution. And the climate ran on a Honeywell thermostat. Ask the dinosaurs. And Europe in the Middle Ages vs the Dark Ages.
The charge here is that "Climate Change" (which nobody denies, climate always has and always will change) = bad weather = global warming ... and implied here is ... that man has something significant to do with it. Talk about moving the goalposts all over the place. But that's the point. They can't win the argument on facts, so they need a shifting "argument".
All the so-called "deniers" are denying is that the Chicken Little's have shown that man's activity has had any significant impact on climate -- if it can be discerned from natural variations. And the real scientific answer to that is an emphatic "no"
4 comments:
Unlike the common use of the term (one of my hugest pet peeves, for the record), this really is "begging the question" -- assuming the conclusion in advance of the argument.
It's equivalent to my favorite question-begging question: "Why do liberals make nothing but disingenuous arguments?"
When I'm dictator, everyone will be required to take "Logical Fallacies 101" in their sophomore year of high school. It'll wipe out liberalism in a generation.
When do you start?
I'm in. ;-)
And my favorite: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Ditto.
The abuse of language is the first weapon of the left. Polarity is reversed, colors are switched, inversions and perversions are the stuff thought is made of. I am no more a Denier of Global Warming or Climate Change than I am of Flat Earth Theory or Aristotle's cosmology.
We're living in a Ice-Age which is only two million years old, after hundreds of millions without. It might be useful to explore why it suddenly appeared rather than to consult Chicken Little on the weather. The lack of climate change which humans are currently experiencing is extremely unusual and very significant. It surely is no coincidence that the evolution of man began during real climate change and that he rose to prominence in it's short summer.
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