Face Off Friday: Global Warming

Today, David and Austin face off over Global Warming.


Austin:

Instead of telling you why Global Warming is a big pile of crap, I'll let the earth muffins tell you:

Head over to this Wall Street Journal page and read in their own words how they have lied.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704779704574553652849094482.html

See.  There really isn't much more I could add to bury this insane movement.  All it took was one hacker to bring forward all the emails from the internet that Al Gore invented to bring it all down.  So...its all their in their own words.  Now its gettin' hot.

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David:

Scientists tend not to be good at politics -- either personal or public. One can hardly blame many of them for a tendency to be secretive, and to try to stay away from the press: their work is so often misunderstood, misused, misinterpreted, and unfairly ridiculed by and in the media, either by reporters and editors on their own or by advocates who have an agenda to push on an unsuspecting and unsophisticated public.

Recent news stories that researchers into global warming may have fudged figures or committed errors in their mathematical models, and pressured their colleagues to present a united front for the purpose of convincing world governments to set policy, have nonbelievers in global warming crowing and congratulating themselves, thinking they’ve defeated the boogeyman of Al Gore (the man who, let us remember, had the 2000 election for President unfairly stolen from under him). The problem here is that none of these sideshows conclusively destroys the primary working hypothesis that the earth’s climate is rapidly warming due to the activities of humans. The speed with which it is happening, or the direness of the straits we are in, may still be open to debate, but pretending that these recent unsavory reports -- and if scientists purposely altered data or hid conflicting information, that is indeed reprehensible -- necessarily change the general conclusion is like saying, “oh, our good ship Titanic managed to dodge that iceberg, and there probably aren’t any others out there.”

We’ll set aside the hypocritical, non-democratic, and thoroughly non-libertarian fact that opponents of global warming (such as the Wall Street Journal) are blithely retailing e-mails that were obtained by hacking researchers’ computer systems (the equivalent of unlawful breaking and entering), and concentrate on the main issue: that we are wiping out a variety of animal and plant species, year by year, and well on the way to destroying the earth as we know it. Quibbling about which way or how fast is simply trying to ignore the obvious, like denying one’s own mortality. I don’t own or regularly drive a car. I gave up eating meat three years ago because I decided that American meat consumption plays a more-than-negligible role in ravaging the planet. Though the tremendous pain and suffering that will eventually descend on our species due to a combination of the destruction of staple crops such as corn, rice, and other grains, insufficient potable or irrigation water where they’re needed, deadly pollutants, and other disasters may not hit in my lifetime, it’s a dubious consolation that I won’t be around to say “we told you so,” or that I have no children whose lives (or whose childrens’ lives) will be made a living hell by what we’ve chosen to do, and not to do, about global warming.

Humans have a nearly unblemished record of failing to make the right choices until it’s too late, whether one speaks of accumulating personal debt, using tobacco products, staying in a self-destructive romantic relationship, pursuing a wrong-headed and counterproductive war, or turning a blind eye and a deaf ear toward impending doom.