The plot "scientist has a crazy idea that no-one accepts but is proven right" has been used in movies from Ghostbusters to the Day After Tomorrow, but when it is satirised in Land of the Lost, S.T. Karnick decides:
My guess is that this aspect of the film was not intended as direct satire but instead simply reflects something the filmmakers picked up in the contemporary zeitgeist. However, its presence in the central story of the film and the bookend scenes-which are in very important places in the film, the beginning and end-gives it great prominence and suggests that skepticism toward such claims of consensus has entered the culture as a real phenomenon.
And he thinks that shows that evolution is in trouble as well as global warming:
Today, by contrast, on subjects as varied as earth's temperature record, the process(es) of species origination, and even whether the speed of light is a constant, many people knowingly misuse science for political purposes, arguing that "the science is settled" on a variety of issues when it most certainly is not.
I think that the speed of light has changed stuff is a feature of Young Earth Creationism (so that light from distant stars can get here in less than 6,000 years).
I found another review by Karnick where he complains about the science in Primeval. Not the time travel, which he has no problem with, but the shows embrace of "Darwinism".
Karnick finishes off by denying the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming, claiming, quite falsely, that the IPCC reports are written by "politicians". This is in a review of a comedy.
Hat tip: Jody Wheeler.
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Yes. Genesis is the literal truth, you'll never convince anyone that the physical measurements are wrong, therefore the speed of light has changed since the time of Creation.
That's *their* belief, not mine, just to be clear!
> > and suggests that skepticism toward such claims of consensus has entered the culture as a real phenomenon.
Shorter Karnick: "Culture" is good and right, unless it's "consensus", then it's evil and wrong. My logic is perfect.
> This is in a review of a comedy.
As they say, if one's not in on the joke, then one's in it.
There's an astrophysicists, Louise Riofrio, promoting her idea that the speed of light has changed through time. I don't know if that is referred to.
http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/
I think she is at least proposing some experiments to verify / disqualify the idea. (Sediments should show moon's orbital changes or something like that.) I haven't studied cosmology so I have no idea about the validity of her GM = tc^3 idea.
God and Gaia are equally fictitious. It is just as nonsensical to say that nature intended for life to exist as it is to say that God intended for life to exist.
As the wise man said, you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you.
One thing I noted in the previews is Matt Lauer telling Will Ferrell that Al Gore claims his scientific ideas are pathetic and that Al Gore has Nobel, as though the peace prize gives him some kind of instant authority into what I'm assuming is physics.
Even when Gore talks about stuff he really did learn about, he doesn't set himself up as the authority, does he? That's what makes it extra odd whenever Gore Derangement Syndrome crops up to do with climate stuff. I can't help but think "I'm following the guy from Futurama without having even seen or read his work? How do crazy people know that about me when I don't even know it?"
What is the Jody Wheeler hat tip?
S. T. Karnick is at least a denier, maybe a Denialist. Note this paragraph from his article, into which he drops the most inflammatory Denialist talking points.
"Lauerâs reaction perfectly represents the mediaâs reaction toward, say, those who claim that the scientific evidence shows that anthropogenic global warming is not occurring and the current temperature trends of the earth show the very opposite of a crisis. Instead of actually engaging the scientific evidence, the media whores simply claim that all reputable scientists agree that thereâs a crisis requiring the absolute destruction of Americansâ civil and economic liberties, and that anyone who disagrees with that premise is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier."
Clearly, Karnick wanted a pretext to sound off about global warming "alarmists" and this film gave it to him.
Furthermore, Karnick appears to be a Creationist. At least, at the bottom of his review of Primeval, he cites two Creationist sites.
Getting back to Land of the Lost, if his description of Dr. Marshall's discovery in the film is correct, it's a perfect stand-in for many global-warming denier ideas in that it can't work as stated â because, if objects from all times coexist in the postulated parallel world, they coexist with the Big Bang.
S. T. Karnick is Director of Publication @ Heartland Institute, was previously at Hudson.
Need I say more?
However, arguing about physical "constants", whether they change, and why the values happen to be "just right" has a long tradition in physics. Apparently, Paul Dirac proposed a changing G many decades ago, for example. I see Speed of light may have changed recently, for example, although "recently" has different meanings in different contexts. In this case, 2B years.
I'm guessing Mr Karnick did not enjoy that other great 20th century comedy "The Day After Tomorrow".
This sort of thing, I believe, just shows that anthropogenic climate change denialism, creationism, and market fundamentalist capitalism are merely symptoms of a deeper malaise. The rightwing authoritarian personality, that type of psychopath without human empathy, indifferent to the fate of others, and equipped with gigantic avarice, egotism and the inability not to lie if it advantages them, is the end product of capitalist 'evolution'. As long as they dominate business, the media and politics, the denialist industry will have unlimited financial and other resources at its disposal, the fanatic support of Rightwing ideologues everywhere, and the loyalty of the bought and sold political kakistocracy, and, thus, nothing will be done. And nature will take its course. Moreover, I believe a significant fraction of the elite, it not being conceivable that they are actually so stupid as to believe their own denialist agit-prop, are quite prepared to actually allow climate change to occur, to cull that lower 90% of the human wealth distribution that they so hate and fear. However, that implies that they are so dim-witted as to imagine that they can make themselves immune, somehow, from the Apocalypse. Or perhaps that is their hidden motivation. Perhaps, with God-botherers like Fielding as an example, they see runaway climate change as 'God's judgement' on a sinful world, the Noachite flood superceded by 'the fire next time'.
I hope we can all agree that the Sun is much much bigger than the Earth. Accordingly, a small change in the sun will have a far greater effect on Earth weather than anything we can do to the earth.
This year has had a very unusually small number of sun spots. For hundreds of years it has been known that more sunspots leads to warmer weather, fewer sunspots lead to cooler weather.
The Arctic ice cap is now where it was in 1970. All the 'warming' since then has been corrected by one year of a cooler son.
Meaker, using your Sun-big, Earth-small theory of climate and everything, how could explain the effect of volcanic eruptions on the Earth's climate... oh, why am I bothering?
As for Karnick, I think I'll stick to David and Margaret for my film reviews.
Shorter tehdude and Don Meaker:
We're spewing irrelevant talking points. Tim, please ban us so that we can whine elsewhere about being suppressed.
Mulga Mumblebrain:
> However, that implies that they are so dim-witted as to imagine that they can make themselves immune, somehow, from the Apocalypse.
I think some people are just short-sighted. It's just who they are.
This documentary was so serious it was cited in peer-reviewed literature:
Why go to fiction like _Day after Tomorrow_ or _Inconvenient Truth_ when you can get the FACTS?
As the wise man said, you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you.
That's dumb, abysses can't stare. Some "wise man." Thpppt.
Or is he implying that you are just as much nothing as is an abyss?
On to the other stuff... the fact remains that these people have to eat, and their bread is buttered by research grants that come from governments. I've dealt with this stuff, and it was the first thing that steered me away from academia was the ceaseless chasing of "funding" for research. I'm not so sure that the general population isn't wise to it either.
Shorter ben:
I have a conspiracy theory about government funding for research, therefore it's OK from Karnick to deduce from a comedy that Global Warming Is A Scam.
* * *
Marion Delgado: lolwut.
Google: S. T. Karnick
Google: S. T. Karnick global warming
and oddly, he's not currently on Heartland's list of "Global Warming Experts", although he certainly writes about it often enough, even in movie reviews.
Folks, he at least gets paid for this...
Karnick is a *professional*.
Visit the original website.
Read down the list of links at the right. See if you notice any patterns.
tehdude writes:
And you know this how? Read a book by Richard Dawkins, have you?
I hardly started reading this post when I thought, "Yeah, just like some Creationists like to think they're doing science when they haven't a clue how science is done, now there are people who think they are being 'skeptical' when all they are doing is denying the evidence."
Don Meaker's "Law of Bigger Things" leads to a series of hilarious conclusions ...
No, it's not. May's talking point melted.
I, too, stayed away from academia. Rather than case funding for research, I chase funding for interesting software projects for clients.
Because I chase that funding, none of the software I write works, either.
Just like science.
(ben, don't you *ever* get tired of looking foolish in public?)
Yeah, the links are not only at the right, they're at the *far* right. Ann. Bill. Enterprise (not the entity that will rent you a car, either). Blech.
An add for a site promoting the drill-baby-drill approach to energy independence.
Directly underneath, one for the Prius III. How'd that sneak through their ad criteria? :)
Tim,
"I found another review by Karnick where he complains about the science in Primeval. Not the time travel, which he has no problem with, but the shows embrace of "Darwinism".
Obviously we have all got it wrong. Karnick is a stand up comedian. In fact Karnick is the Bansky of stand up comedians. He has fooled us all as you've gotta admit the above summary of his revue reveals pure, unadulterated comedy.
BTW. If you wanna stop a creationist in their tracks just ask them to translate Gen 1 to 3 straight from the Hebrew
There's an astrophysicists, Louise Riofrio
Louise Riofrio is an astrophysicist in the way that Gene Ray is a philosopher.
Big Hollywood is so far on the fringe that it may be giving the site undeserved credibility even to link to it. Check the upper left-hand corner of the masthead. It is run by Andrew Breitbart, self-described "Matt Drudge's bitch", who had this charming analysis of the Holocaust Museum murderer:
Running movie reviews from the faculty of the Heartland Clown University may be the least of Breitbart's offenses.
Frank Bi, in their day the Marshall family was every bit the scientific equivalent of the Idsos, and I would place equal weight on their research acumen.
Tim,
Lighten up its only a movie. Did you get this hyped up about the Day after Tomorrow? (Guess not).
But Karnick is correct in one respect. The IPCC Summary for Policymakers, essentially the only bit that they mostly will read, is a product of the political system and nothing you say can gainsay that.
D @30
Do people ever talk to senior scientists who have participated in doing the IPCC SPM?
If not,ask them about the requirement that *every* government sign off on *every* word of the SPM, including (just to pick a few at random)the USA, Russia, and Saudi Arabia:
Do they think this process takes the IPCC science (in main report and TS, inherently conservative by the nature of such science reviews) and *amplifies* it or waters it down?
It's a political process all right, but every country has a *veto*, just like tobacco companies had a veto on the members of the 1964 Surgeon General's committee.
I'd guess that Karnick likely knows all this. He works for an organization that has taken tobacco money for decades, and has thus helped tobacco companies get kids addicted to dangerous, but profitable products. That is the only way cigarette companies stay in business, because people who start later can often quit. Cigarette companies have long passed around internally the US government reports that say that, although of course they knew it long before.
Heartland has been a leading helper, and they have much practice at anti-science. Suppose you take money to help cigarettes. Where would you draw the line on what you wouldn't do? (With practice on cigarettes, climate anti-science is easy by comparison.)
Folks... it's just a movie! What next the latest Star Trek to get hammered because it didn't show any noticeable climate change on Earth in the 24th century. More important things to be worried about perhaps....
Shorter D and MarcH:
Karnick used Land of the Lost as proof that Global Warming Is A Myth. He's right because Land of the Lost is just a movie.
No, it's not. May's talking point melted.
I wonder why this one's different?
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and…
Shorter spangled drongo:
D and MarcH are wrong, but they're still right.
FIRST CAUSE
"If we regard the fulfilment of our purpose as contingent upon any circumstances, past, present or future, we are not making use of first cause, we have descended to the level of secondary causation, which is the region of doubts, fears and limitations, all of which we are impressing upon the universal subjective mind, with the inevitable result that it will build up corresponding external conditions."
Thomas Troward,
Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science 1904
This zeitgeist is madness, or at least crasy making. Seems to me that peak oil and AGW are linked by fear. It has always been the case that prosperity has advanced as monetary inflation permitted. A steady increase in the money supply leads to higher prices and wages to measure them, and more people able to participate. Adjusted for inflation, copper and oil and gas,e.g., are not much more expensive than they were in the early 20th century, and we have more supply and more people have electricity and transportation. The Dickensian world has gotten smaller as the 'American Dream' expanded to Asia. The environmental impact also, adjusted for inflation, is less and society has generally progressed, as is reflected in human lifespan in the west.
Environmental lobby groups (ELGs) since their inception have had a stronger inflationary effect than historical supply and demand pull and push. Witness the oil sands, for example, uneconomic in the early going but reaching ore grade by gradual steps and external (secondary) jumps, ratcheting upward to economic viability. In recent years, a number of ELGs (led by Pugh Foundation??) have come to question the cost in CO2 and open pit mining. I'll come back to that later. I project that gradual inflation would have led to logical scientific and technical development of kerogen shale as it has permitted the developments in unconventional shale oil. Furthermore, there are vast areas untouched on continental shelves and in arctic Canada. How much hydrocarbon lies under the shelf off Bengaladesh? I do not know, but I am willing to bet there is some. The ANWR could be drilled from a platform of 2,000 acres.
Our situation in 2009, however, is that secondary causation (fear of the future) has disrupted the steady growth of prosperity. For instance, after 30 years of mining the oil sands footprint covers 0.072% of the total land area of Alberta and could ultimately reach 3,000 km2 (0.45%) without equilibrium reclamation (No reclamation has ever been approved by Alberta, so you see where that puts the Companies; Syncrude has reclaimed 23% but is vulnerable to not having that approved by bureauocrats in the thrall of ELGs). The annual CO2 contribution, moreover, is 4% of Canada's 2% of the global 2% or 16 ppm, a di minimis figure considering the CO2 sea water equilibrium. That estimate is vanishingly small in the context that CO2 may not even be a greenhouse gas, and that water vapour moderates climate modulated by cosmic radiation.
Government is attempting the modify behaviour, based upon a deeply flawed secondary causation argument that resources and ingenuity are finite, and that CO2 is pollution. All this arises from fear; history shows that, in fact, prosperity is the best birth control. Without fear or doubt, peak oil is 1,000 years away. There is even time to go nuclear (safely).
"That way lies our hope where sits our greatest fear." (Gandalf)
Fran Manns
323 Blantyre Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M1N 2S6
416-698-6291
When we're all eating poorly packaged food labeled "REAL COCKROACH MEAT! NO MELAMINE!!", demented sociopaths like "Francis Tucker Manns" will still be telling us we've never had it better, thanks to the magic of the market, including but not limited to the godhood of immortal and omnipotent corporate "persons," the One True God Mammon, His Invisible Hand, and of course, the plane fetishes that bring the "cargo."
In fact, when we're all extinct, the sociopaths will still have recorded audio playing all over the ashes of the Earth declaiming the true faith. And the planet will be carved into the shape of a dollar sign.
Francis Tucker Manns #36
Oh Lord help us!
Apparently, its the greenies that have made the tar sands economic, not the limits of oil and growth in demand. And Mr Manns Thinks others have a problem with causation logic!
Marion,
Logical Positivism may be long dead and Platonic Idealism a fossilized remnant, but zombies are still gnawing their bones.
Its comfort food.
Shorter Francis Tucker Manns (who is surely channelling Neil Craig):
"Ponzi scheme? What Ponzi scheme?"
Shorter FTM v2:
"That economic parrot ain't dead, it's just resting".
(Of course we haven't nailed it to the perch!)
>Manns: CO2 may not even be a greenhouse gas
And Manns may not even be an idiot, but the evidence is likewise overwhelming.
For The Record (FTR), we're not exactly Under Any Obligation (UAO) to make up Three-Letter Acronyms (TLAs) for Everything We Write (EWW).
If it wasn't already obvious:
Mann as Poseidon.
cosmic rays and others.
PH.D., P.Geo. (Ontario).
and in a comment on Tim Ball's blog.
Ahh: Canadian geoscientist (maybe petroleum?), living in Ontario, follower of Tim Ball.
F.T. Manns writes:
That CO2 is a greenhouse gas was established in lab work by John Tyndall in 1859, and we now have a quantum mechanical explanation as to why. It can be demonstrated in any lab with the correct equipment, of which there must be tens of thousands nowadays. There is no doubt at all about CO2 being a greenhouse gas.
Water vapor, due to its rapid cycling time (about 9 days), is more modulated by climate than vice versa; and since the cosmic ray profile has shown no trend for 50 years, it can't be causing the sharp upturn of global warming in the past 30.
Just a comment about Karnick's review itself. It says
*a new dramatic TV series from the British Broadcasting Corporation, is currently airing on a weekly basis on BBC America.*
It might well have been picked by BBC America for broadcast in the USA but the BBC did make it. It was made by 'Impossible Pictures' and shown by ITV, not the BBC.
Doh! ...the BBC did **not** make it.
Forgot to say that this was in his [Primeval](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeval) review.
Idiots like him and the legions of ditto heads living in selfish denial are going to bring us to a point where our use of coal and fossil fuel will combine with our ignorance in the face of hard facts will bring about rapid drastic climate shift that is being exasperated by the simple fact that now we should know burning coal is stupid, but the people making money off it, all of us are not willing to just stop and clean up our act. While they all yack that CO2 is a myth, the hot hard truth is the CO2 is only a small part of the dread to come. It is when the permafrost melts and when the temp in the deep ocean rises a few more degrees that is when the Methane will be released back into the carbon cycle and in the atmosphere it has many times more the adverse effect of CO2.
So what we know is only the tip of the ice berg so to speak, and the berg is melting.
I would hope RUSH and his army of ditto heads and all the others like him would rapidly move to the coasts or Delaware, and they should then be asking, how long can you tread water. No doubt as fat as he is, Rush will float like a cow pie in a cow pond.