The Enlightened Despot

Here’s some more hard-hitting analysis from the same Representative Shimkus Frederick quoted earlier as worrying about the potential for lower carbon levels to starve plant life:

The evidentiary worth of the Bible’s testimony is not universally agreed upon, and in any case, the two arguments conflict with each other. If the Bible is literally, infallibly accurate, then the era of high carbon levels Shimkus references never occured - Earth is only a few thousand years old, after all. And anyway, God just said he wouldn’t drown us all; he never said we wouldn’t get our feet wet.

Meanwhile, over at the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford links to this from the Sunday Telegraph:

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”.

I suppose it’s possible that the man who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world is also a guy who believes in dowsing, also known as ‘divining’ or ‘water witching’, and that magnetometry mapping should make it possible to map individual footprints made by Ancient Greeks at a site the rest of the archaeological community thinks is a hoax, but it doesn’t seem all that likely.

There are still rational, honest people out there making the case that global warming won’t do as much harm as we’re told, and that proposed measures against it are therefore not worth pursuing. I think these folks are wrong, but I don’t think they’re stupid or crazy. But I do wonder why they don’t make more of an effort to call the liars and lunatics out for what they are. I will never get back the minutes of my life I spent reading about Morner’s views and checking into whether he was worth taking seriously. That makes me less inclined to bother with the next article purporting to present anti-alarmist science. If these people were ridiculed by people on both sides of the issue, it would be a lot easier to seperate the wheat from the chaff. So, attention Jim Manzi: when the Stuttafords of the world peddle this garbage on a blog to which you are a contributor, why don’t you call them on it?

Tags: crazy people, global warming, intellectual dishonesty

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.