Tuesday, April 13, 2010

“Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism”.

So I chose the website http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php. The pages tag line is “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism”. I actually found the site to be very clever and pretty convincing.
It’s a site that is clearly trying to convince its audience that global warming exists. It does this by laying out over 100 common, yet simple arguments used to refute the existence of human caused climate change. They address the more intelligent points of skepticism as well as some of the more stupid ones. For example;

Skepticism #10: “Antarctica is gaining ice”

Answer: “While the interior of East Antarctica is gaining land ice, overall Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Antarctic sea ice is growing despite a strongly warming Southern Ocean.”

Skepticism #14: "It's freaking cold!"

Answer: “Since the mid 1970s, global temperatures have been warming at around 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. However, weather imposes its own dramatic ups and downs over the long-term trend. We expect to see record cold temperatures even during global warming. Nevertheless over the last decade, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows. This tendency towards hotter days is expected to increase as global warming continues into the 21st Century.”

I found the argument to be quite “rich”. They are able to lay it out in a way that even a child would understand, yet it still makes sense to a well educated adult. They refute these arguments of global warming by displaying scientific as well as historical facts. The site also gives off a sense of authority by the sheer number of points of skepticism that they were able to dismiss. How could one dispute it if it’s so easy to argue against?

1 comment:

  1. I am a week late in my commenting, but your post ties in well with the ideas in Robin's article that we are to read for Tuesday...his idea being (in part) that the people promoting skepticism of global warming are actually not trying to make any sense, but are adopting the language of their "oppressor"....

    And is someone skeptical of global warming going to read a skeptic-of-skeptic's website and be convinced? They probably wouldn't even go there and look right? We are all just preaching to our choirs, perhaps?...

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