Global warming: The snob factor

Among the many facets that combine to make up the global warming fallacy, one that should not be overlooked is the factor of the alarmists’ pseudo-intellectual pride.

If you are a rational person, conservative or liberal, you have certainly run across those people to whom disagreement is simply intolerable. No matter how well-constructed an argument you may make, they will find some way to stand logic on its head to refute it or, barring that, simply resort to ad hominem name-calling to belittle the standing of the person who would dare suggest they might be wrong.

I’m not talking about someone who merely stands by his principles and believes he has good reason for his beliefs, right or wrong. I’m talking about those for whom reasoning doesn’t even enter into the picture, for whom their knowledge was delivered from “on high,” probably at an Earth Day symposium, college lecture or the auditorium where they watched “Inconvenient Truth.”

For those people, the things they “know” are almost physical in nature, something they cannot survive without tending to, like eating or going to the bathroom. For such people, it comes down to a simple philosophy: “I MUST be right, therefore THEY are wrong.”

Consider Al Gore’s recent 60 Minutes interview in which the interviewer put to him: “Well, you’re launching this big ad campaign at a time when there’s still a lot of skepticism about whether global warming is manmade.”

Al Gore replied: “I don’t think there’s a lot. … I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the Earth is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off.”

To anyone who has been paying attention to the mountains of accumulating evidence that the global warming hysteria is nothing more than bad science coupled to a cynical money-making scheme by Gore and big energy companies, Gore’s statement is incredible, to be kind.

He knows he has no facts to back up his position, and the manufactured “facts” he has been touting have one by one been publicly and soundly disproved. Further, he knows his base of loyal followers has probably topped out and is beginning to shrink, so there’s nothing left but to demean the enemy, which is all rational people, of which I still have hope that there are many, at least in this country.

In keeping with his anti-intellectual stance, it’s not even a well thought-out insult that Gore makes. Conspiracy theories such as the staged moon landing one would expect to be found on the liberal side of the spectrum, since liberals often display a high level of gullibility, i.e. 9/11 being staged, Valerie Plame being an undercover agent, polar bears drowning, etc.

And anybody with any depth of historical knowledge should be aware that the “flat-earth” concept was largely invented in the 19th century as an attack on Catholicism and an attempt to promote Darwinism. With a couple of obscure exceptions, a flat Earth was not believed by any thinkers in Western civilization after about the sixth century B.C., including the much-maligned medieval philosophers and church leaders. In fact, not only did medieval philosophers believe in a spherical Earth (some even speculated about an Earth made of two partly overlapping spheres), but many felt that because of God’s love of symmetry, there must be land on the opposite side of the Earth from Europe and Asia. They called this land Antipodes, and believed it would be inhabitable. When Columbus set sail, no one objected that he would sail off the edge of the Earth, but some churchmen objected that he had grossly underestimated the distance to China. Guess what?

So Gore, in his desperation to defend his increasingly indefensible position, only shows his own ignorance in trying to assert the ignorance of his doubters.

We now have three presidential candidates who are wedded to the global warming hysteria in hopes of getting votes. At least one of them, Obama, probably believes Gore’s “warm-mongering.” Clinton will cleave to the party line for the additional power global warming policies will give her. Our best hope at this point is that Sen. McCain will secure the White House and then can be made to listen to reason, as he finally did on immigration.

All us “doubters” must continue to press for the truth to come out.