Bluesy Monday is the one day that they came here,
When they haunt me and they taunt me in my cage.
I mock them all, they're feelin' small, they got no answer.
They're playing dumb but I'm just laughing as they rage.
-- Davies, Richard; Hodgson, Roger, "Asylum"
A single transgression can be excused, but on Monday Lou Dobbs repeated his dismissal of climate science and again entertained the notion that the sun is to blame for what's happening with global temperatures. As an American journalist, he is free, of course, to believe whatever he wants and share those thoughts with his audience. But so are the rest of us entitled to point out he seems to have swallowed the pseudoskeptical kool aid.
Last month it was the absurd notion that recent bad weather in a couple of dozen of the lower 48 somehow makes 150 years of rising global average temperatures meaningless. On Monday he focused on solar influences. Media Matters singled out utterances at odds with IPCC statements, utterances like "My gosh, compared to what our sun can do, man has minuscule influence." While that's troubling ;;; yes, what the sun CAN do dwarfs human's capacity, but that's not the point; it's what the sun IS doing that's relevant here ;;;; I was more bothered by the use of a now-common talking point used by the the still-powerful anti-science contingent. Specifically:
The one -- the one issue here, and as we have examined and reported on the issue of global warming, it is so clear that on both sides, but particularly the pro-global warming, if there is such a thing, if I can put it that way, they are -- they bring this thing to a personal belief system. It's almost a religion, without any question.
Dobbs said this immediately before bringing up the solar forcing red herring And yet, it's the stubborn refusal to let go of an idea what has been so roundly and soundly discredited time after time that suggests a religious devotion, does it not? The notion that climatologists are the slaves to dogma is so at odds with reality that its persistence can only be explained by a coordinated propaganda campaign. I'll bet Frank Lutz is responsible.
Let Lou Dobbs know he's not doing his audience any favors my misleading them. His email address is lou.dobbs@turner.com.
If you search Orcinus for Dobbs you will learn much more darker side of him than just a little GW denialism. He is openly racist, etc.
Well, obviously, he no longer matters. Send him to the ovens!
Last year a staff member of our state Agriculture Extension service put an opinion piece up on our local PBS radio station. She claimed even an ignorant cave man can realize that the big ball of sun in the sky puts out a lot more heat than his little campfire.
I think that's called "appeal to ignorance".
Squawk I've been practicing my French. James - You are a total assbite. Pardon my French. Skwawk.
Dear Mr. Hrynyshyn,
With your permission, I would like to put your blog post on my blog. Please let me know if this would be all right with you.
Thank you,
Tenney