Another day, another big lie.
Complete nonsense. There was a worse drought 10 years ago and in the 1950s. What is wrong with these people which compels them to lie about everything?
Contiguous U.S., Palmer Modified Drought Index (PMDI), December-November 1896-2012
“What is wrong with these people which compels them to lie about everything?”
Maybe they are just stupid and don’t know any better…
“What is wrong with these people which compels them to lie about everything?”
Like all children, they repeat behaviors for which they face no consequences. If you never make a child pick up his room, what do you think it will look like every day? Scaremongers never get challenged if their lies support myths popular with self-righteous lefties, so why should they forgo the warm embrace they receive for spewing nonsense?
This isn’t so much the part that bothers me. What really bothers me are the people that believe the shit. My father for example. Despite being an MIT grad in engineering, working 35+ years in one of the most reputable research companies in the world, he believes the bullshit on SkS, drinks the bullshit like koolaid, and refuses to believe anything real. It is so frustrating for me, and quite frankly I just cannot and do not understand it at all.
You may want to buy the book “Not By Fire but By Ice” by Robert Felix, and have it sent to him. After my first copy was stolen, by some scum of the earth, my only request for this holiday season was a new copy. If you visit ice age now dot info, there is a sale till the first of the year.
But on the other hand if he’s that into believing the lies nothing will save him.
Or you might consider suggesting he read the basics (to the grandkids – wink,wink):
“The Wolf That Cried Boy” (Yes, not the Boy That Cried Wolf) — Hartman
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wolf-Who-Cried-Boy/dp/0142401595
And/or
Chicken Little (A science fiction novella) – Doctorow
http://www.amazon.com/Chicken-science-fiction-novella-ebook/dp/B0064EG7RQ/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356973014&sr=1-5&keywords=chicken+little
Squid,
this has been like this for centuries thus your father is but another person today who gets stuck on passed by science and stagnates.
I think it is based on something other than convictions on science that causes such people to chose the wrong position in the first place.
Is it because he is , as the Libertarian Party puts it , a believer in the cult of the State ? If he were to question the State sanctified “science” he would have to question his entire “liberal” world view ?
Please take no offense with what I am about to say, but I have dealt with individuals like your father in the past. Most educated or “educated” people are like that. I think that part of it is arrogance, part hubris. The truth is that a lot of uneducated people are quite keen. I believe that common sense is one thing that cannot be made up for by an education. That is not to say that educated people don’t have common sense, but that their education has clouded it. A lot of the educated people that I have interacted with are narrow minded and closed to points of views other than their own supposedly scientific or empirically based viewpoints. I don’t believe that they realize that they are isolating themselves when they do that, perhaps because they only ever work with other educated. Perhaps it is an attitude issue, like thinking that because a level of academic credential has been achieved that everyone else below that is less qualified to have an opinion or that their opinion is somehow less valuable.
Not to mention PBS!!
They come from the “Joseph Gobbles” school of disinformation. Keep repeating the lie till it becomes truth. As long as the so called “media” keeps covering their collective “Nestles Highway’s”, nothing will change.
Climate has never been the real issue for them, just a means to an end.
Over here, John Gummer (ex Environment Minister) has recently been made Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, a hugely influential body.
I have discovered he is also a Council Member for the World Future Council (WFC),even though he has not declared it in the Parliamentary Register of Interests.
The WFC is an extreme left wing outfit, with policies such as :-
Global common goods to be placed in trusts, coordinated by a revived UN Trusteeship Council, setting sustainable usage caps and distributing “commons income” usage fees as a basic citizen’s income.
Read their full manifesto here.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/john-gummer-and-the-world-future-council/
The world has several sickos’ of gummers ilk . Look at the current crop here is the ruling administration of the US . As to the lies of Mckitten/Masters they are evidentially just dumb . How could the explanation be anything else ? Oh , unless they are corrupt as well ?
That is Agenda 21; many different names, same theme.
Ever hear of “believing your own lies”? It always starts out as “concocting a plausible alternative explanation”. Then, as one is pushing the alternative, which one truly believes to be more likely, one starts to see flaws, and one may begin to think one’s preferred alternative is not the more likely. But, for the unscrupulous, a decision is sometimes made to keep pressing on, rather than to come clean and admit error. After all, it still could be correct, right? But the lie enters with trying to deny the new-found uncertainties or doubts.
Later, as the lie becomes more entrenched, one may begin to perceive that it is so dangerous for the lie to be exposed that one begins to delude oneself into once again believing it. At this time, we have entered into the realm of “believing one’s own lies.” As others perceive the mounting delusion, they may become so frightened of what the sick liars are capable of that they themselves manage to start self-deluding out of a sense of security or survival. Perhaps this is also the origin of “group-think”, the “echo-chamber”, or the …
DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT!!!!!
as Mikey has so eloquently expressed it.
RTF
An inconvenient fact: the U.S. Drought Monitor began in 1999. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/drought/nadm/
These people claim to have the moral high ground, to the point where they want to exterminate “deniers”. If so, why do they feel the need to repeatedly lie thru their teeth?
E.g., the “No Pressure” video commercial, or what that politician in Europe said.
Well except for the 2000 and 1950’s drought times they are completely accurate!
snicker……
Once again – you’ve brought data to a rhetoric fight. When will you learn…
The ability to deduce opposite conclusions from the same data: is there a statistical law about this, or at least an explanation?
Lewandowsky did it recently with his poll results. It can’t just be cherry-picking.
It strikes me that it is cherry-picking datasets. I suggest that the problem comes from the questioner suffering from the Unique Solution Syndrome: a (false) belief that all questions have only one solution, so that once you find a solution you 1) know you don’t have to look further, as you have found the one and only, and 2) know that all other, apparent solutions must be wrong because, by definition, the “unique” solution has no companions.
The USS fails doubly in climate science.
The first is its inability to recognize that truth is something we approach, not capture (William James Pragmatism, here). This means that all datasets are incomplete: the practical element is that whatever datasets we have, being necessarily smaller than “all”, are incomplete None will represent completely the object we wish to study. Something will be missing, a something that will be or could be picked up in a different, but also incomplete, dataset. Thus datasets collected on the same subject cannot be expected to mirror one another. If the differences are sufficient, one might even come to a reverse conclusion.
In the example above, McKibben seizes a dataset you didn’t. Since he thinks one subset of reality is a complete representation of reality, and all subsets will be equal, he need look no more.
The second failure is that his question, is 2012 the most drought-afflicted year since the 1930s, has more than one answer (the Unique Solution Syndrome). This is a failure of imagination as well as of understanding.
There are several ways to look at this.
One way: Since the 1930s we have farmed more and more marginal lands; drought, being a state of lower than required precipitation and not just low precipitation – we do not say that the deserts of Arizona are in a “drought” condition, but we do say the edge, farmable areas outside the desert are – we must look to what we are doing to say that there is or is not a drought.
Prior to the 1930s, the western portions of the Texas panhandle were grasslands. They were periodically dry. Only when we cultivated them for wheat (during wet years) did a reduction in rainfall produce a “drought”. A statistic for drought in this area was dependent on us determining a range of adequate moisture, which until then would have been described simply as a range of moisture.
Another is what a drought is: is this a lack of natural precipitation or a lack of access to sufficient water for irrigation? Are highly irrigated areas (using the Ogahalla underground reservoir, for example, which has been falling at about 1 foot/year due to “over” use) to be considered within the drought area because natural rainfall has fallen further? This is a practical consideration, for if you think of drought as something that reduces our ability to grown food, then irrigated areas are both permanently in a drought condition and permanently in a positive food contribution condition. Almost the entire State of Israel is drought-stricken, and the Israelis seem to be doing better than fine for food.
If, like McKibben, you wish to push “drought”, you need to understand that what you call a drought has more than one set of defining terms. There is more than one Solution when you say that this year or that year is more drought-stricken than others. There is no intrinsic meaning of an event that happens every so often except in the human terms, but the human terms have their own, different conditions.
McKibben believes each “extreme event” has a unique cause (solution if perceived as a problem), and he believes each event has a unique portend or repercussion. In this case, drought conditions depend first on what we perceive we need, not what happens, even if what we perceive we need is inappropriate, and the implications – the worry, the alarm, the reason to rise up – of this “drought” are not necessarily the same as the last.