Easier to find an honest man than a scientifically literate Republican

by: Eric B.

Mon Dec 14, 2009 at 12:32:35 PM EST

Candice Miller writes an Op-Ed about climate change.  Heads shake sadly in response.

There is little doubt that the world's climate is changing, because the climate has always changed. Just ask the dinosaurs or remember the ice age and how huge glaciers melting and moving formed our Great Lakes.

Here, it appears that she's riffing off Thad McCotter's, Michigan's own two-dollar intellectual in Congress. And, though the prospect of asking dinosaurs anything in the English language is a neat rhetorical trick, it ignores that the most popular scientific theory today is that their fate was undone by a giant space rock rather than over consumption of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, embedded in this post is now a picture of what the Earth's land masses looked like 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct.

You may notice some -- errr, subtle -- differences between what the Earth looked like back then and what it might look like today (if you're really so geographically handicapped that you need a link or picture, I insist you stop reading this blog right now).

Although it might be fun, strictly for S's and G's, to pretend that the shape of planetary land masses may not have a role in shaping the climate of the time, what say we dispense with the silliness and take it for granted that the Earth is markedly different today than it was back when the dinosaur stalked the Earth for reasons other than industrialization.

What we get here is part of a long string of lame excuses for why the data scientists are currently looking at is just not right. Skeptics, deprived of a real narrative to explain why the global mean temperature today is rising (and, yes, it continues to rise, despite the protestations of a cherry picked period of time starting in the late 90s), instead wave their hands far back in history as if it really means anything. Things that influence global climate patterns may be changing, but this is the reddedst of red herrings. What matters to us today is whether our planet is warming, and whether we can accurately identify its causes. Today, we have a very good idea that excess carbon and other gases in the atmosphere is trapping energy from the sun as heat and slowly warming the place up.  We also have a good idea where that excess carbon came from.  What is irrelevant to this conversation is whether dinosaurs exterminated themselves by driving SUVs, which is the point someone is ultimately attempting to make here.

In the paragraphs before that, Miller (or whatever member of her staff ghost wrote this) referenced ClimateGate, those e-mails from a climate research enter in the United Kingdom that skeptics have been waving around as if they are meaningful.  As we've noted 'round these parts before, their points are cherry picked -- not representative of the point someone was attempting to make -- and taken out of context. 

The question that has to be asked here is whether anyone bothered to read this Op-Ed through,  or whether it was just published without a second thought as to whether it was fulfilling a newspaper's primary responsibility to first inform the public and then to help prevent the misinformation of the public. In this regard, we have to acknowledge the Op-Ed's home, a newspaper that frequently treats scientific inquiry and data as shouting points, and whose editorial contributors frequently engage in open conspiracy theorizing that might have others pulling tight hats made of tinfoil.