Neil Reynolds is probably the Globe and Mail’s premier hack columnist: your bog-standard anti-Keynesian upper class white guy with a knack for pretentious phrasing oft combined with folksy imagery. The Globe generally doesn’t have a lot of gratituously pointless writers on its staff, so presumably Reynolds fulfills a quota; either that or he couldn’t get a job with Sun Media.
Consider the following passage:
But people adapt to changes in climate. In the Dirty Thirties, people delivered blocks of ice to the poor, slept in basements, wore wet headbands under their hats, went to air-conditioned movies – and took it easy.
This is really a masterpiece of twaddle. In the Thirties, see, there were hot summers! But people of the time (who, by virtue of being older and more self-reliant than the current spoiled generation, were better people) “adapted” by sleeping in basements and wearing wet headbands beneath their hats. If this were a “of times gone past” sort of column, this hokum would be forgivable if not laudable. But it’s not: this is the basis for Reynolds’ entire column, wherein he explains that global warming isn’t a big deal because the changes are very small and anyways we’ll just adapt to it. We will, as our forefathers before us, sleep in the basement and therefore global warming is really not a bother at all!
This sort of fatalistic non-denial denialism is nothing new for Reynolds: just a month past he was ponderously repeating the words of Robert Laughlin, a physicist with no actual climatology background, who informed us all that despite what we might believe, climate change will not destroy the Earth. Having managed to dispense of that straw man while glossing over the minor problem of mass extinctions and the not-really-comforting thought that just because we can’t blow up the planet with global warming doesn’t mean we can’t render ourselves extinct, Reynolds sat back, content being the Wise Man of Letters. Before that, he was explaining that Europe may experience some truly harsh winters in the coming years with a tiny little “not that this has anything to do with global warming but maybeeeee people will stop believing in it!” so as to appear reasonable. Reynolds doesn’t bother with low-class denials of basic scientific evidence; he’s too well-bred for such things. Instead, he goes for the “it’s really not a problem” form of denialism – denialism because it, like the more traditional form, exists to stand against the idea that, gosh, maybe we should do something about carbon emissions.
(Also, not particularly related to the subject matter at hand, but do consider this gem, wherein Reynolds discusses a 19th-century geologist’s study on coal supplies as if it was in any way relevant to anything whatsoever, as evidence of his ability to suggest that the inconsequential or irrelevant are in fact deeply consequential and relevant.)
Of course, the problem with this entire line of argument is that slight changes in temperature can do things much more bothersome than force you to sleep in the basement. For example, they can result in half of Russia being on fire. Or mass flooding rendering more than two million Pakistanis homeless.1
Now of course these instances aren’t necessarily climate-change related; there’s no way to definitively prove that one way or the other, and to do so would just be engaging in the reverse of “look how hard it just snowed so there’s no global warming” arguments that are definitively stupid. But what is true is that increases in temperatures make dangerous weather of this sort more likely to occur, just as a mass decrease in temperature might make glaciers marching across Europe more likely.2 Dangerous weather of this sort isn’t “adaptable.” It’s just expensive, and generally then requires federal expenditures to make life livable again for the affected populace, which of course is something Reynolds traditionally dislikes so you’d think he’d be on the “spend a little now to save a ton later” bandwagon, but shockingly this is not the case.
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MGK, thanks for posting this. I was pretty sure he was full of BS but didn’t want my only confirmation to be from the Globe’s comment board.
It’s just expensive, and generally then requires federal expenditures to make life livable again for the affected populace, which of course is something Reynolds traditionally dislikes so you’d think he’d be on the “spend a little now to save a ton later” bandwagon, but shockingly this is not the case.
Well, no. Because it’s really “spend a little now to save my children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren a ton later”. And frankly people like that don’t really care about what their hypothetical great-grandchildren might have to pay to support their current “gimme gimme gimme mine mine mine” attitude right now.
Unfortunately as far as I can tell people like that are the ones running most of the governments in the world at the moment.
To be fair, a lot of the people trumpeting global warming dangers these days aren’t climatologists themselves (I.E. David Suzuki).
I agree that the Earth won’t be destroyed by global warming. Earth will be fine! Humans will be fucked up, but the Earth will keep on spinning.
And then comes the time where the mighty aardvark finds the monolith.
I would think that with global warming, we could use the Cheney 1% rule previously used as an excuse to invade Iraq, as in, there is a 1% chance that global warming could wipe out civilization as we know it so we should spend every borrowed dollar we can get our hands on and do something (probably something less than useful, especially if the Republican’s have any input, but you never know) about it.
When speaking of the Globe’s hack columnists, don’t forget Christie Blatchford and Margaret Wente.
The biggest problem with global warming is the phrase “global warming”. Climate change is a much better term that doesn’t confuse the more ignorant out there. Well, doesn’t confuse them as much.
I think we’ve had the “What Global Warming should really be called” debate here at MGK.com before, and the general consensus was, IIRC, that ‘climate change’ was too vague and non-threatening enough to either reflect the gravity of the global ecological clusterfuck we’re going through or motivate people to try and fight it.
If dinguses like Reynolds had been in charge of the UK during the 19th century then London would have no sewer system (“we’ll just adapt to the massive deadly outbreaks of typhus and gonorrhea!”) and we’d still have pea-souper fogs because “people” like Reynolds would have fought the clean air act of 1956 tooth and nail (“we’ll just adapt to the respiratory illnesses that kill small children and the elderly!”).
Because it’s really “spend a little now to save my children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren a ton later”
That is actually my favorite not-quite-truism about the whole climate change thing – you remember how the human life expectancy keeps getting bigger and bigger, so that currently people born in the 1940’s are liable to make it to 2050? Well guess what?
When climate change really starts to take effect all the nay sayers and denialists will be of the age and in the same condition that most of the elderly people who end up dying during various urban heatwaves currently are.
These idiots, these complete numpties, are basically shortening their lives by quite a fucking bit, and their eventual deaths should be quite horrible – dehydration isn’t nice, it’s less fun than malaria (which you’ll have outbreaks of all over canada and the scandinavian countries btw) as your organs fail over the course of hours and you’re a bit delirious but not so much so that it stops you feeling the agonising pain of it all. Of course if you don’t die of dehydration whatever nasty medical conditions you do have will be made much worse by the worsened climate.
Oh and you know what your children and grand children will be doing during your gradual degradation at the hands of an event you don’t believe in? Fucking watching and laughing “Need a drink of water to stop your internal organs from failing grandpa? well you’ll just have to fucking adapt won’t you? Why don’t you adapt to your fucking hernia grandpa? does pissing blood make you a better person grandpa?”
If these fuckers weren’t such a small minority of the people who’ll be killed by climate change it’d almost be just.
I know the climate scientist can’t specifically say the Russian fires and Pakistani floods and the ever-more-common-once-in-a-century events are caused by global warming because of the possibility of statistical outliers, but we sure can. There is no doubt to this mostly-layman mind that there is causation.
So he’s on page 3 of the warming denialist playbook:
1: It’s not happening.
2: It’s not our fault.
3: Even if it is our fault, it’s not a big deal.
4: It’s too late to do anything about it.
“Robert Laughlin, a physicist with no actual climatology background”
True, but he has a Nobel Prize in Physics. That’s a real Nobel prize by the way. Unlike Al Gore’s Nobel ‘Peace’ prize, the joke Nobel as it’s known. And Gore has no climatology background either.
It all comes down to the same thing for you denialists. All you have is a weak correlation between temperature and CO2. So you resort to images of melting glaciers and polar bears, and try to sell them to the public as proof. But we all know now that polar bears and melting glaciers are merely evidence that the climate changes, they are not evidence that CO2 is the cause.
The public does not believe you alarmists anymore, so it is you the alarmists, who are in denial now. Denialists!
Climate change is dead. Get over it.
Go home, you lost.
Which makes citing him an Appeal to Authority, since he doesn’t actually have any relevant credentials.
What’s your point?
Compelling. Real compelling.
You’re wrong, Klem: we’re winning. Ten years ago I could count the number of people I knew who believed in global warming on one hand. Now I can count those who don’t believe on one hand, and I don’t even need all the fingers.
Doesn’t matter if you don’t think so.
Technically, Al Gore has some climate background, in that he took a course back in the 60’s with one of the first scientists to investigate global warming, and later as everyone saw spent quite a lot of time on the topic himself, although admittedly not as a scientist. He’s not a climatologist, but you don’t need to be in order to read and weigh the facts.
“Compelling. Real compelling.”
Last fall Climategate killed the Copenhagen Summit. It also lead to the destruction of the credibility of the UN IPCC, which is now attempting to ‘reframe’ the issue by claiming that CO2 is really a threat to biodiversity not climate. The IPCC is now telling their scientists to keep their mouths shut when the media is around too(Lol!). Just mentioning climate change is political death; most governments now avoid the subject as was demonstrated at the G8 and G20 summits. Controlling carbon has led to the fall of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and his replacement will not mention climate change publically during the election campaign. The EU is now stuck with their corrupt carbon trading market, where you can photocopy carbon certificates and make millions selling them again and again. Climate legislation has predictably failed in the US Senate and the Democrats are now fighting for their political lives.
Is that compelling enough for you?
I say again: Climate change is dead. Go home, you lost.
So, your evidence that global warming isn’t real is an event which has been investigated numerous times and has been conclusively shown that the research is sound, and some politicians who won’t do anything about the matter?
No, that’s not even the least bit compelling.