Archive for the ‘singer’ tag
Chatting with denialists: unstoppable bull
I got myself into an annoying conversation with climate denialists on the overground train when a couple were pointing excitedly at Singer’s “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years“. I found myself having to justify and defend the entire discipline of climate science against claims of lying to get research funding and secret edits made to IPCC AR2. Whenever I attempted to reason with physics they just argued “well, I don’t know physics, but I do know what this guy says…”
CO2 is transparent to visible light, opaque to infrared. How hard can that be?
They trotted out the usual nonsense about the medieval warm period and confused the global mean with local effects.
They argued about the use of the words “very likely“, so I had to explain how the UN assign probability in summary reports as well as confidence intervals. That fell on deaf ears.
They thought it was amusing that the UN produces executive summaries for policymakers, as if there’s something sinister going on there.
They didn’t like me arguing for doing something about climate change on libertarian grounds of an insurance.
Worst of all, they argued that the “consensus” wants to turn the clock back, and wants poor countries to suffer - completely ignoring the focus on supporting developing nations in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
They suggested that global warming would be great!
When I suggested multiple times that the poorest countries would be affected worst by climate change, they changed the subject each time until I pushed the issue - at which point I had to get off.
I had to defend an entire range of disciplines from crude attacks, but I didn’t once ask where Singer got his funding.
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