The hottest hoax around!
Here’s a fun cartoon which will convince you (as if you need convincing!) that global warming is, like, such a hoax.
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4 Responses to “The hottest hoax around!”
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August 22nd, 2006 at 12:28 pm
ROFL! That is priceless - especially the bit about the “flatulent gophers”
:D 
Thanks Frog, gonna save to disk and spam all my friends with it hehe
PS: Direct link to flash file:
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/fiore/2006/08/hoax.swf
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:27 am
What is it that that group that Augie Ower is in dissagrees with?
Henry
August 28th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Thanks, Frog -
yet another file on my drive of things that aren’t serious research, and then I’m tempted to download all the other great animations by this artist, and there goes another chunk of space…
But we do so need the funnies!
August 28th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
“What is it that that group that Augie Ower is in dissagrees with?”
Well, they say lots of things, some of which conflict with each other.
I guess a summary of their overall take is that
(a) greenhouse gasses are caused by high temperatures rather than the other way around (hence explaining all the geological data correlating the two)
(b) greenhouse gasses don’t raise the earth’s temperature by much (except for H20).
(c) the earth isn’t really warming, it’s just that our ways of measuring it that have changed because thermometers near cities pick up heat from the city and etc,
(d) the earth is warming, but it’s all just part of a natural cycle
They’re not silly positions to take, until you start pulling out the actual measurements and doing the maths to check if they’re right. Once you do the hard yards to check up on them, then the wheels fall off because they turn out not to be based in facts.
Augie Auer himself has quoted Fred Singer a lot. In fact I think everything he’s said publicly on the issue is a Singer quote. Singer uses some dodgy maths based on mis-understanding the difference between perturbing a dynamic equilibrium and a static equilibrium and concludes that our C02 emissions are too small to be responsible for any noticeable affect. Singer also distrusts “big complex mathematical models” and calls for every model to declare the “inputs” the are using - where he defines input as a set of linear factors. Of course, most models assume non-linear behaviour, so that makes no sense.
The constant theme in Singer’s work is that it makes for really good sound-bites, but makes no sense mathematically. But a reply of “Singer’s wrong because those factors are non-linear” is not the sort of thing the public or media want to hear, no matter how true it is.
It was Max Planck who said “Science advances funeral by funeral.” He’s right: you always end up with a coterie of retired and semi-retired old fuddy-duddies who simple will not accept that their old paradigm has been replaced by better methods which support different theories. Thanks to major sources of industry funding (particularly Exxon, who fund Tech Centrla Station), climatology gets fuddy-duddies with a large PR budget. Lucky them.