Friday, February 09, 2007

What's Worse than Hyperbole? How About A Lie.

I just want to take a moment to comment on a lovely piece by Ellen Goodman at the Boston Globe. The article is another blast of hot air on the global warming issue, basically stating that the politics of global warming haven't changed despite the fact that the global thermometer has.

That's all very well and good. But what gripes me is this statement.

By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.
Since when has scientific fact been 90 percent? Do only 90% of scientists agree on the speed of light? The existence and role of DNA? The fact that dinosaurs once walked the earth? If scientists never reached more than 90% consensus, we'd still be debating that the earth is round.

I won't even go into her comparison of Holocaust deniers to global warming deniers (By the way, what a novel idea! Where did she come up with that?) Instead, I'm just going to start calling people global warming sympathizers. Spewing forth and succumbing to the political propaganda machine much like Nazi sympathizers did 75 years ago.

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