Monday, June 20, 2011
Sneaky conflation
Conflation is one of the main techniques of effective propaganda, but it's not usually mentioned by people who claim to teach us how to spot propaganda.
Excellent example in today's UK Guardian, the leftmost of the major papers there. (The Guardian occupies the same position as nearly all "American" newspapers; Britain still has some real ideological competition among its big papers.)
Headline:
The 1847 lecture that predicted human-induced climate change
A near-forgotten speech made by a US congressman warned of global warming and the mismanagement of natural resources.
Part of the article:
Well, when you read the speech, Marsh does talk about urban heat islands, which have been understood as long as we've had big cities; and he does talk about the bad effects of clearing forests without replanting. Both of these are real problems, real causes of changes to local and mid-scale temperature and humidity.
But Marsh doesn't say anything even remotely presaging the CO2 fraud. He says nothing about the chemistry of the atmosphere.
In other words, Marsh was right on everything. He was right about the effects of cities and clear-cutting, and he was right in not mentioning anything about carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide has nothing to do with climate.
The Guardian's attempt to put words in his mouth may succeed among the Gaians, but it's a little too obvious to succeed elsewhere.
Excellent example in today's UK Guardian, the leftmost of the major papers there. (The Guardian occupies the same position as nearly all "American" newspapers; Britain still has some real ideological competition among its big papers.)
Headline:
The 1847 lecture that predicted human-induced climate change
A near-forgotten speech made by a US congressman warned of global warming and the mismanagement of natural resources.
Part of the article:
More than 160 years on, it really does pay to re-read Marsh's speech as it seems remarkably prescient today. It also shows that he was decades ahead of most other thinkers on this subject. After all, he delivered his lecture a decade or more before John Tyndall began to explore the thesis that slight changes in the atmosphere's composition could cause climatic variations. And it was a full half a century before Svante Arrhenius proposed that carbon dioxide emitted by the "enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments" might warm the world (something he thought would be beneficial).
Well, when you read the speech, Marsh does talk about urban heat islands, which have been understood as long as we've had big cities; and he does talk about the bad effects of clearing forests without replanting. Both of these are real problems, real causes of changes to local and mid-scale temperature and humidity.
But Marsh doesn't say anything even remotely presaging the CO2 fraud. He says nothing about the chemistry of the atmosphere.
In other words, Marsh was right on everything. He was right about the effects of cities and clear-cutting, and he was right in not mentioning anything about carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide has nothing to do with climate.
The Guardian's attempt to put words in his mouth may succeed among the Gaians, but it's a little too obvious to succeed elsewhere.
Labels: Carbon Cult
¶ 7:59 AM
