2008 Woodie Awards
Global warming exists, and you can help stop it
Peter Viola '06
Issue date: 3/9/06 Section: Opinions
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As renowned television broadcaster and defender of democratic values Bill Moyers has noted, one significant trait of the current political culture is that "the delusional is no longer marginal." Rabid ideology, feeding upon so-called "truthiness" and distortion of the facts, has moved into mainstream American debate as the illegitimate heir to public democratic discourse. It postulates fiction as reality, and twists spuriousness itself to its own defense.
Such is the tone, perhaps unconscious, of Michael Jou's unfortunate article in last week's Campus "Think about it, global warming does not exist, March 3". Written, in Jou's words, "to incite the reader to question global warming," the piece does little more than demonstrate that a French major with no real experience in the scientific study of climate change can choose to accept popular science fiction literature as fact. While I'm a passionate student of languages and literature myself, and no expert in science, I hold all such fields in high regard, and I do not like to play intellectual games by mixing them through uninformed guesswork and speculation. I find it mystifying that the author of the article could believe that environmental scientists are "off their rockers" while also believing that it is rational to view the work of the author of Jurassic Park as evidence that global warming is a "conspiracy."
But rather than respond directly to specific points made in the article, which many others are more capable of addressing than myself, I would like to clarify more generally the double-speak of such irrational thinking. The primarily non-scientific claims against the existence of global warming, like many other patently ludicrous ideologies which attempt to deny "legitimacy" to hard observation of any kind, revolve around a faulty logic of accusation: in this case, that global warming is only a "theory," and that the evidence of its effects is "biased." Of course it's a theory, and of course it's as biased as the multitude of individuals who study it from differing perspectives. But both complaints miss the point, amounting to the willful ignorance that says objective scientific truth is found in some fluffy realm where bias does not exist, and that anything termed a "theory," which by nature is a hypothetical method of explaining universal patterns arising from everyday events, must be false.
Such is the tone, perhaps unconscious, of Michael Jou's unfortunate article in last week's Campus "Think about it, global warming does not exist, March 3". Written, in Jou's words, "to incite the reader to question global warming," the piece does little more than demonstrate that a French major with no real experience in the scientific study of climate change can choose to accept popular science fiction literature as fact. While I'm a passionate student of languages and literature myself, and no expert in science, I hold all such fields in high regard, and I do not like to play intellectual games by mixing them through uninformed guesswork and speculation. I find it mystifying that the author of the article could believe that environmental scientists are "off their rockers" while also believing that it is rational to view the work of the author of Jurassic Park as evidence that global warming is a "conspiracy."
But rather than respond directly to specific points made in the article, which many others are more capable of addressing than myself, I would like to clarify more generally the double-speak of such irrational thinking. The primarily non-scientific claims against the existence of global warming, like many other patently ludicrous ideologies which attempt to deny "legitimacy" to hard observation of any kind, revolve around a faulty logic of accusation: in this case, that global warming is only a "theory," and that the evidence of its effects is "biased." Of course it's a theory, and of course it's as biased as the multitude of individuals who study it from differing perspectives. But both complaints miss the point, amounting to the willful ignorance that says objective scientific truth is found in some fluffy realm where bias does not exist, and that anything termed a "theory," which by nature is a hypothetical method of explaining universal patterns arising from everyday events, must be false.