I heard a story on NPR this morning that gave me fits. One Kristen Byrnes, a 15-year-old, has (with the help of, and probably at the behest of her step-father, Mike Carson) amassed a huge amount of data and published a blog expressing skepticism about global warming. Normally, I am all for skepticism (it is one of my fundamental tools in trade), but in this case methinks it's being misapplied.
After I heard the article, I went to the NPR web site and read the transcript, just to make sure I hadn't misheard anything, forgotten anything, or myself misinterpreted something. As far as I can tell, I haven't.
So what's my issue? Miss Byrnes (and her step-father, and/or the reporter--and if it's the reporter's imprecision that caused my complaint, I apologize to Miss Byrnes and Mr. Carson) made an error in logic. She has framed the argument in terms of whether humans are causing global warming, and has decided due to all the climatological statistics she's accumulated that we are not--that the changes in temperature of late are just part of a normal long-term change in the Earth's climate cycle. She also cites the fact that people who commented on her blog in disagreement eventually gave up, implying that they were overcome by the soundness of her arguments. I, on the other hand, think those people finally realized Mark Twain's wisdom when he advised, "Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig." Not to say that Miss Byrnes and her step-father are pigs. Far from it. It is to say that they are so invested in their own beliefs that they cannot even entertain the thought that they are the ones in error.
No one with any education about the difference between weather and climate says humans are causing global warming. The issue is whether human behavior since the Industrial Revolution increases the pace and degree of global warming--perhaps to a dangerously irreversible level.
This is not a subtle difference. It's the crux of the entire argument. I don't care how many facts and figures Miss Byrnes has amassed. Nothing in the historical climate record can answer the question definitively, as data demonstrating the impact of human pollution exist for only the past couple of hundred years . . . an eye blink on the climatological scale. It is not illogical, however, to infer from the data showing the volume of pollutants that we have pumped into the atmosphere in the last 200+ years that we are messing with the natural, pre-industrial patterns of climate change, which will have long-term, detrimental effects on the planet.
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Yet another bit of spectacularly bad logic also was displayed recently on NPR, this time by Geraldo Rivera. He said people who opposed illegal immigration were wrong, for two reasons: (1) immigrants are assimilating, just as every other immigrant in US history has during past waves of immigration; (2) opposing immigration was racist, as it came down to supporting a wall across the Mexican-US border.
Well. I know Geraldo Rivera is no intellectual heavyweight, and I do appreciate it when he takes idiots like Bill O'Reilly to task, but he's wrong in this case.
(1) Pardon the anachronism I'm about to present, but it's the most efficient way to make my point. In no prior wave of immigration did we ever get phone messages that said "for English, press 1; for Irish, press 2; for German, press 3." If the Hispanic immigrants really are assimilating, and at a similar pace to their chronological (if not ethnic) forebears, why are all telephone voice mails suddenly requiring us to choose English or Spanish?
(2) I do not oppose immigration per se, and I do oppose a wall (mostly because walls don't work in cases like this). What I oppose is illegal immigration. Without some semblance of law and order, society cannot function. When society stops functioning, everyone suffers, no matter how they came to the US. We have to stop illegal immigration. In the meantime, those who want the benefits of living in the USA must also comply with the rules of living in the USA. To quote Robert A. Heinlein: "TANSTAAFL." [That's "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." --Ed.]
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