Add Homonym Attacks! #34
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
The Relatively Convenient Truth
Ah-hem. Here it goes. The world is not ending any time soon. The apocalypse is not nigh. The war in Iraq was not foretold by the book of Revelation. We will still have fish and ice in 50 years. Even if your waist is over 34 inches, you’re probably not going to have a heart attack any time soon. The United States can easily handle a population of 300 million. Literacy has been steadily increasing. People are living longer.
In short, things are good.
BUT THE ICECAPS ARE MELTING!
I here people talk about this thing a lot. My reaction is multi-faceted:
A) Are you sure? –
The Arctic, according to the International Arctic Research Center, was at its warmest in the 20th century during the 1930’s, and both the journals Science and Nature have published studies recently finding – on balance – Antarctica is both cooling and gaining ice….
A 2005 study by Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass
Decorated geophysicist Claude Allegre says that studies show that the rate of snowfall in Antarctica has been steady over the last 3 decades, and it is gaining ice.
Another study shows that Alaska has been getting colder in recent years.
B) Aren’t climate changes cyclical? –
The world was uncomfortable cold 400 years ago, but uncomfortably warm 1000 years ago. It is believed that the Dinosaurs lived in a much warmer climate, while the Mammoths lived in a cooler climate. Few studies support the idea that dinosaurs used the fossil fuels out of which they were made.
Hell, 30 years ago people were warning us about the dangers of Global Cooling. Let’s wait and see.
C) How much climate change are we talking about here? –
The IPCC gives us an estimate of an increase of 0.6 ± 0.2 °C over the course of the 20th century.
Source
So the world got about 1/2 a degree warmer over 100 years. Big f*cking deal. AND The thing here is that this warming seemed to stop in 1998.Source
D) How much of that climate change is due to increased emissions by us? –
Depending on who you ask, an increase of about 0.1 °C can be attributed to increased Carbon Dioxide emission since the Industrial Revolution.Source
Furthermore,
Observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future”¦Significant advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary….
Source
E) Is a hotter Earth bad? –
The city of Buffalo has never recorded a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Wouldn’t that be nice for them? If you are worried about warmer temperatures and overpopulation, I’ve got one word for you: CANADA.
F) Would melting be a bad thing? –
Let’s say, the arctic does melt. Unless the sun gets significantly hotter, this thing will take significantly longer than the lifetimes of all of my readers. Combined. (Granted, I only have four readers.) It would lead to less temperature differential of ocean water in the northern hemisphere. More temperate, less tempests.
That runs contrary to what you hear on the news, right? When there is a bad hurricane, people try to link it to “global warming.” But this last hurricane season was exceptionally mild. I could be wrong on this, but I believe it to be the first time in my lifetime when the US was not hit with a hurricane.
Let’s focus on the melting for a bit. We’ll stop our letters and just talk melting. Specifically the scary notion of rising oceans.
The north pole is basically all ice. Think of it as a big glacier floating in water. About 90 percent of it is below the surface, displacing water. Ten percent is above the surface, not currently displacing water. As ice turns to water, it decreases in volume. One gram of water has about 90 percent of the volume of 1 gram of ice.
Here is where I am going with this: Currently, 90 percent of the North Pole’s volume of ice displaces water. If it were to melt, it would amount to about 90 percent of the North Pole’s current volume of ice displacing water.
Net change = 0.
“Ah, but Kennedy, the South pole is different. Antarctica is a land mass, not an ice cube! You stupid f*cker!”
This is true.
Antarctica is a continent.
The south pole melting would raise ocean levels.
As we have noted earlier, however, Antarctica is actually increasing in ice. In fact, the entire Southern Hemisphere has not shown a temperature increase in the past 30 years according to NASA satellite tropospheric temperature data.
The Southern Hemisphere is not warming.
Even the “global” part of global warming becomes misleading.
In Conclusion
If you see the Gore’s walking down the street, you might be tempted to punch Al in his smug and pudgy face. Don’t do this thing. He has a security detail.
And besides, if you were to risk jail for such a minor assault, Tipper is a much better target. The fascist cunt.
More Sources:
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/guide.htm
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Greenhouse_not_a_problem.htm
