(continued from Global Warming: Asking the questions)
Admittedly, judging the messengers is absolutely the worst way of getting at the truth, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
On the one hand, there are a whole bunch of scientists and professors, folks who have drilled ice cores from the antarctic glaciers and chased weather balloons for years, who are saying that much of the CO2 greenhouse gas panic is bunk.
Another group who raises their collective voice in a loud chorus is the celebrity crowd: singers and actors.
A third group are the politicians, led in the chorus of panic by Al Gore.
Finally, there are the "scientists", primarily under the umbrella of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ringing the alarm bell. But they don't shout about the sky falling quite as vociferously as the politicians and singers. I'll explain why that is, in a later post.
The two groups who have the greatest following are the celebrities and the politicians.
Hmmmm....
Well, of course, if you're looking for information about climate change, surely you would believe a great singer, or an oscar-winning actor, before you would listen to some geeky, pipe-smoking, stuffy old professor who has spent the last ten years charting 100,000 year old ice core samples.
Right?
Sure. Hell, you betcha, "Two-squares-of-toilet-paper" Sheryl Crow is the one I'm gonna believe, every time!
Crow calls for limit on loo paper
Moving on, to consider another of the messengers. Try an experiment: go down the main street of your home town and ask everybody you meet if they think politicians tell lies. Just about every person that isn't a politician, thinks politicians always lie. How can you tell when they're lying: when their lips move, right? I'm not saying this is fair, nor am I saying it's true, but just about every person old enough to vote seems to have this opinion.
And yet, go figger(!), Al Gore (a politician, remember?) jets around giving speeches at more than $100,000 a crack, and everybody takes each word as gospel. People who wouldn't trust a politician to give them the right time of day, all of a sudden think that the boring old professor of climatology is just an idiot, doesn't know what he's talking about--but those politicians sure do! And they're so honest and forthright, too!
Any mixed motives possible?
Sorry, but the stuffy old underpaid professors and lab-coated scientists naturally LOSE on the credibility issue! Show biz folks and politicians are much more intelligent and believable.
But make up your own mind. One note of caution: remember the two questions:
a) Are we in the middle of long-term global warming?
b) Is mankind responsible, and can we reasonably make a difference?
Keep the questions firmly in mind, and listen (or read) every word, because one of the tactics used by those who want to snow you is to hop back and forth and treat the two questions as one and the same. They're not. It's quite reasonable to believe that one is a yes and the other is a no. But watch out for the messengers who deliberately use false logic to make their case.
(Next, let's follow the money)
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