Paraphrasing Thursday's climate change editorial in the NY Times.
Y2K was a joke, UFOs and scary science fiction scenarios have no proof, climate change is the same, the end.
For a contrast with the idiocy of this "editorial" in the Times...
...see the basic facts, in stark contrast.
Near the very end of the piece, and out of the blue -- after going on and on about Y2K fears and the like -- the author, a philosophy, not science, professor (and clearly a pretty bad one), brings up climate change for the very first time. And he simply decides that it is in the same category as these other, largely imagined, or even farcical, fears.
What are his reasons for this?
None.
He just decides it.
The full extent of his reasoning? "It seems to me."
Well, actually, he does offer one ostensible "idea." Gloomy seeming climate change scenarios, "it seems to him," are largely "based upon eschatology," not science. See?
That was the editorial.
Quick contest: You have one week to come up with the absolute worst editorial ever, as if you were writing it for the Onion -- only it could not be too obvious or funny. Our top 100 winners will then be invited to send their pieces in to the most heralded and selective editorial page in the country. If one of our contestants is, somehow -- silly as this seems -- able to finagle those pages into publishing their piece of abject tripe, we will pay them one million dollars. Obviously, we are not worried about having to pay this out.
Oops. We were wrong! We actually have a winner. Denis Dutton, crafty philospher professor (or science ignoramus) of New Zealand, come on down!!!
Let's rehash: Y2k was a bunch of hype, people like apocalyptic scenarios, Frankenstein was a monster, so it "seems to him" that climate change is not really based on science, but eschatology, or the branch of theology dealing with the end of the world, death, or final judgment.
Seriously, that was the editorial.
Too bad the NY Times did not publish my oped back in '99 on how Y2K was way overblown before the year 2000 turned, rather than another one saying the same thing ten years after the fact.
But now the Times has learned their lesson, so have published Dutton's editorial essentially warning that serious climate change concern is way overblown, like Y2K, or fears based on the supernatural. Why? Because it "seems to him" it is! Man, is their judgment on, or what.
Plus, let's not overlook "climate change [aka basic science] is Y2K" bonus material: Climate change is theological! (Heck, even the Arctic ice caps, and now even formerly stodgy and slow moving Antarctica, are getting in on the theological fun!!)
Here is some more excellent eschatology, by way of example.
As ice caps and glaciers melt, warmer water rushes down cracks, bringing pressure and heat (ice also melts faster in water than air), increasingly speeding up the glacial melting process; the heat reflecting albedo of the white snow and ice is then lost, leading to more heat absorption and further warming; warmer water expands even further, raising water levels even higher; the cooling effects of icebergs in the ocean may initially be increased as more and more ice breaks off into the sea, and then reduced, and then eliminated as more and more ice disappears, leading to an increasingly rapid transition to warmer water; warming water also tends to retain less carbon dioxide, meaning even more stays in the atmosphere, thus trapping even more heat; the hoped for ‘cooling’ effect of increased cloud cover in some areas due to increased evaporation instead is offset or outweighed by the increased greenhouse effect of far more water vapor; melting permafrost (and perhaps even warmer ocean currents acting on ocean bottom methane clathrates), releases even more methane, particularly in the carbon riddled bogs of the Siberian Tundra, while heat and drought fires over the warmer Eurasian peat bogs release their stored carbon in the form of even more CO2, and so on and so forth…
The above? Not science. Eschatology.
Also Eschatological, and not related to science, are the facts that atmospheric levels of the gases that trap heat are around 28 percent higher than at any point in the past three quarters of a million years, and that the rate of increase is over one hundreds times faster than any time observed though an examination of ice core sampling, in the case of CO2; and around 124 percent higher, in the case of methane, than at any time in the past three quarter of a million years.
And they continue to rise. Rapidly. Almost instantaneously, from a geologic perspective. But that's eschatological too. Right along side, as Dutton cleverly points out, our "inner demons," "Frankenstein," and "UFOs."
Also eschatological is the fact that it takes an extremely long time to heat up oceans, or that changes to natural systems stasis' tend to accelerate as the amount of (effecting) input increases, and so most effects of an atmospheric climate forcing like increased trapped radiation are going to lag decades behind their cause; or that we have, and are still, adding enormous net amounts of the gases responsible for these forcings to the atmosphere.
And of course, the idea that these greenhouse gases trap heat? Also eschatological. Not science. (Those fools over at the NOAA,what are they thinking with eschatological pronouncements such as this?) Or that trapped heat has anything to do with climate? Also, quite clearly eschatological, right alongside fears that extra zeroes in computer systems would cause our systems world wide to come crashing down, as Dutton also so very cleverly points out.
As for the NY Times' reasons for publishing this abject piece of manipulative and extraordinarily ignorant piece of crap?
Who knows. Maybe they think it is provocative: Say, along the lines of suggesting that:
We don't know if the Times publishers or editors are having gay, extramarital sex and cocaine parties with insider coal industry executives. But we'll leave out that we don't really have any idea, or that there is nothing to support this wildly libelous charge, and instead point out that it just "seems to us" that they are. Maybe instead of eschatological, it's scatological, or something. The end.
This, has been an editorial.
Thank you to our lawyers for pointing out that there is clearly no negligence or malice in making this "satirical claim" against the Times management, offered to show how wildly irresponsible and illogical it is to choose to selectively publish extremely misleading, highly misinforming, and illogically connected assertions, on a critical topic where rampant misinformation is already part of the underlying problem.
The funny thing is, those that proclaim with certainty that we are "doomed" if we don't take sensible redress -- even those who are otherwise extremely informed and, often, very informative -- are only adding to the ability of some to see some credibility in the underlying (but manipulatively, ignorantly, and falsely expressed) idea played upon here that perhaps gloom and doomers are a bit too gloomy and doomy. Which of course has nothing to do with this op-ed, which is also what makes it such a piece of absolute, unabridged, abject trash (or AAAT for short).
The NY Times has just entered the world, of the AAAT.