Admittedly, the reason I instinctively think these people are arses is because their views on the world differ from mine, but I have had many a pleasant and stimulating conversation with nice people whose views differ significantly from mine, so I tend to discount this instinct and look for other reasons why these people suck. A lot of the people who post comments are clearly not the sharpest tools in the box but, again, this is certainly no reason to call them an arse. However, I believe people should have some sense of the intellectual level on which they operate. I, for instance, know that I should not attempt to participate in discussions about advanced mathematical concepts such as tensors and string theory, because my degree taught me that I'm just not clever enough. Sad as it may be, I think a lot of people should take a similar line with climate change - they should realise that it's over their heads and not attempt to wade into the discussion, guns blazing, armed only with the knowledge that climate change is bad and they don't like it.
Take this example from today's discussion:
The "Greenhouse Effect" is still a theory, even after 40 years of publicity and research. Why is it still a theory and not a fact? Because scientists cannot predict weather more than ten days in advance let alone 100 years in advance.
What about the melting of the glaciers? They have been melting for the last 6,000 years.
What about the rising sea levels? Research shows that sea levels have risen only in mm.
The FACT is that global warming is part of a natural cycle of the Earth.
Right, let's go through this point by point and try to pin down exactly why Atif is an alabaster retard (Mighty Boosh reference there in case anyone missed it).
Question: Why is the Greenhouse Effect still a theory and not a fact?
Answer: Because that's how science works - as you put a theory through more and more rigorous tests, it becomes more and more likely to be true, but while you can disprove a theory, you can never prove it. The theory of relativity, for example, is not fact - it's a theory, hence the name.
Stupid statement: Scientists cannot predict weather more than ten days in advance let alone 100 years in advance.
Flaw: Well, no, they can't say for certain whether it will be showery with sunny intervals on a given Tuesday in the year 2107, but that's slightly irrelevant since the theory of Climate Change states that the climate will change because of human activity. I could have come up with the theory of Weather Change, a theory that states that in the future, the weather may be different from how it was today. Weather and climate are two subtly different things, Atif, and I suggest you learn what they are before attempting to form opinions about them.
Oh, and the thing that most pisses me off about Atif's comment - his capitalisation of the word FACT in his final sentence, in that 'aha, you see, I am right' kind of way. Except... he has used this capitalisation to emphasise a final sentence which no-one is denying. Yes, global warming is part of earth's natural cycle. Who said otherwise? The point is that we humans may well be accelerating the process. Oh, sorry, Atif did actually address this point by quoting an irrelevant statistic and using the infallible phrase 'research shows'.
I guess there are two things that really annoy me about Atif's post and the many, many, many others like it. Firstly, having spent four years of my life learning just how meticulous scientists are when it comes to even the tiniest field of research, and knowing how much work I had to put in to produce a final dissertation that wasn't even anywhere near the standard of work accepted by scientific journals, it feels like something of an insult when people like Atif treat science as this set of statistics that you can pick from to back up your point, like a GCSE English essay where you go through a book looking for quotes to support the title of your essay, which you came up with on a whim and can't be arsed to change now because it'll feel like a waste. Yes, you probably can quote a bunch of passages from Romeo and Juliet out of context and persuade a sympathetic teacher to give you a C minus for your coursework about how Romeo actually fancied Mercutio (which may well be the case, I didn't pay much attention at school), but that doesn't mean you can do it in the real world when you're talking about complex science. And yet you can, and people take you seriously, which brings me to me second and perhaps bigger annoyance - Atif's post was the most popular in the discussion. Of the five-hundred-and-seventy-six comments published so far, this blatantly flawed bollocks was the comment where most people thought 'yes, here is a man who knows what he's on about'. But he bloody doesn't! If we are the most advanced species on the planet and we're still stupid enough to hail Atif "Smeg-For-Brains" Darr as having written the best comment in a sample of over five hundred people, how come the other animals can even walk?
I'm not sure how coherent all that was, but I think the comment was enough on its own to demonstrate why I'm annoyed. Briefly, to put things in context, I have two main opinions on climate change:
- As a bit of a socialist, I hate the fact that corporations will do nothing to prevent climate change, if it is happening, unless there's something in it for them, and I hate the fact that petty right-wing people paint the whole situation as a left-wing conspiracy - peer-reviewed science papers can't hide political agendas in falsified results because they'd get found out when someone tried to reproduce the results. It's not a bloody conspiracy so play fair and debate this properly you greedy capitalist arses.
- As a scientist (well, a guy with a physics degree), while I'm not yet totally convinced of the scale and speed of climate change, the overwhelming consensus seems to be that we are causing something to happen and it's bad - if this is the case, why is no-one doing anything? What are we waiting for?
No comments:
Post a Comment