Hey, just from his picture I can tell this "blockhead" is a nutcake! These nutcakes denying Climate Change is of course nothing new. It is a silly business much like the argument for "Intelligent Design". The same semantic games are played to deny science whether it be creationism or global warming. These anti-scientists make the silly argument that if science cannot prove something – they do not agree with – in the absolute, then it is absolutely wrong. It is the standard case of beginning a logical argument with a false premise to arrive at their false conclusion which is used thousands of times a day on talk radio and Fox News. Or any entity THAT KNOWS they are pushing crap.
What got my dander up on this one is the "Who is" blurb after this opinion piece in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle. "Cunningham is a geophysicist and former fighter pilot and Apollo 7 astronaut."
Though true what Ronnie Walter Quincy Cunningham does these days is writes for and is paid by The Heartland Institute, a radical conservative think tank that not only denies Global Warming and was mostly founded upon famously supporting tobacco companies, but advocates the privatization of Social Security, Medicare and public education. Ronnie Walter Quincy Cunningham not only has too many names, he is a nutcake in the pocket of the extreme right and any newspaper worth its salt should at least give the readers a hint to that. But I guess that’s what blogs are for…
This part of his column with the "4 points" is taken right out of The Heartland Institute. I also counted the times this anti-scientist uses the word "alarmists" instead of "scientists". 11 times in one article.
About 20 years ago, a small group of scientists became concerned that temperatures around the Earth were unreasonably high and a threat to humanity. In their infinite wisdom, they decided: 1) that CO2 (carbon dioxide) levels were abnormally high, 2) that higher levels of CO2 were bad for humanity, 3) that warmer temperatures would be worse for the world, and 4) that we are capable of overriding natural forces to control the Earth’s temperature. Not one of these presumptions (opinions) has proven to be valid.
Boggles the mind how anyone could be so wrong about every single thing. But he has Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, a few scientists paid by the Heritage Foundation and the Evangelical crowd on his side, so that’s that!
The group decided to challenge the accepted theory of climate change when they hypothesized that human-generated CO2 was responsible for global warming. They have been trying to generate support for their beliefs ever since. Their new hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) gained immediate traction with environmentalists, the media and, eventually, politicians. It has gained little acceptance among legitimate scientists.
"Legitimate scientists" are only those like Ronnie Walter Quincy who are paid by the Oil and Gas lobbies, conservative think tanks or are Evangelical Christians praying for the Rupture. [Really, about 25% of Americans and more than half of Republicans spend time each day praying that every man woman and child in the world, 6 billion of them are killed by God. That’s GOOD THING! It’s really hard to wrap your bippy around something so intrinsically self serving and so obviously EVIL in the name of Jesus than that. Funny how the math works, that would be almost exactly 1000 times worse than the Holocaust.]
For a new hypothesis to be accepted by the scientific community, it must be confirmed by considerable evidence and must survive all attempts to disprove it. The hypothesis claiming that human-generated carbon dioxide is a principal driver of the earth’s temperature has not satisfied either of these criteria.
And there it is, the silly semantic argument the anti-science crowd plays no matter it be global warming, creationism, Intelligent Design or supply side economics. If science – that they happens to disagree with for political or religious cause – cannot prove their point is 100% true then it is 100% false. While they enjoy not having to prove any damn thing at all. As Stephen J. Gould said so long ago when he was the voice of reason regarding evolution, anti-science does not a science make.
Global warming denial is about three things. Oil, gas and mining lobbies wanting to pollute on the cheap to keep their board happy, conservatives hating to pay taxes so much they will crap in their own nest and religious nitwits believing tornadoes are the fingers of God.