Gore's Law In Action

Readers of my last post, on the subject of Gore's Law, may have been of the mistaken impression that Gore's law only apples to blog comments boxes. Kiwi blogger David Farrar aptly demonstrates that this is not the case, flying into action in the first half of the first sentence of an actual blog post:

Like a medieval religious zealot, Al Gore claims that those who still doubt that global warming is caused by man are the equivalent of those who think the moon landing was faked.

A medieval religious zealot? I was unaware that the moon landing was actually an issue in the Middle Ages. Oh well...

DPF continues:

Scientific debate is in fact the exact opposite of lunatic conspiracy theories.

True enough, but are climate change 'sceptics' really engaged in a scientific debate? Hardly. While there are uncertainties, there is next to no disagreement amongst climatologists about the fact that current climate change is human induced and a real concern. There is no real debate. What we have instead is climate 'sceptics' grasping at any evidence whatsoever that appears to support their theories though while diligently ignoring everything else. And this is something they have in common with conspiracy theorists.

Indeed, DPF himself, while grudgingly acknowledging that there is "fairly wide consensus that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to warming" attempts to counter this concession by emphasising uncertainties using a quote from an article in the Australian. The quote's from an interview with Jennifer Marohasy in which Ms Marohasy claims that new satellite data and recent temperature trends provide us reason to doubt the danger presented by climate change.

Marohasy is not a climatologist, of course, and her employer has a rather comfortable relationship with oil companies, but none of this would matter if her claims were actually right. The trouble is, they're not. She's not credible, her claims are wrong and one has to wonder why, out of all the good information on climate change on the internet, DPF had to choose her as a source. In doing so he certainly did nothing to counter Al Gore's supposition about climate 'sceptics' and conspiracy theorists.

[Update: Edited second to last paragraph for clarity]

Gore's Law

In 1990 Internet Lawyer and writer Mike Godwin gave the world Godwin's law, stating that:

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

The rise and rise of Internet Climate 'sceptic' nonsense means it's time for an update.

Gore's Law

As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.

Have a look. This Hot-Topic thread begins to Gore after about 21 comments. While this Poneke thread is Gored badly almost from the start. There's plenty of Goring going on in this thread too. And some organisations, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute have grabbed both horns, so to speak, and Gore right from the outset.

Here's a hint. Al Gore could be short, evil and fond of child sacrifice. He could emit more CO2 snoring at night than Christopher Monckton does all year. And his movie could be even more inaccurate than the Great Global Warming Swindle. But this wouldn't change a thing. What matters is not Al Gore's character but science. And, in the case of climate change, it's awfully compelling.

[Update: And, not willing to wait until the comments box, David Farrar Gores hard right at the outset in his latest piece of climate blather.]

Cool New Blog

Really, there's not much need for any fanfare when I add a new link to my link list. I'm hardly going to be directing tonnes of traffic in their direction. Still, I just wanted to say that The Hand Mirror is cool.

The Parable of the Little Boy Who Watched Adults Avoiding the Wolf Once too Often

Poneke makes use of a poorer than average review by John Lancaster to sneer at media and government overreactions to the Y2K Bug scare.

She’s almost right: the scent of possible catastrophe sent much of the media into a feeding frenzy. Their tales and fins thrashed the water as they competed for chunks of impending doom. And this didn’t do much to add to clarity on the actual issues.

I even recall reading somewhere (possibly in Nexus in which case it serves me right) an alarming passage on how Y2K might cause the silicon chips in milk cartons to malfunction! Even as a much more credulous younger man, I still wondered about that a bit. I mean, what role does a silicon chip in a milk carton actually play? And, if it suddenly ends up in a muddle over dates, how disastrous can that actually be? Still, that didn’t stop me from racing home at 11:59pm on New Year's eve and eagerly watching the fridge (from a vantage point behind the couch) hoping to learn just what the problem was.

But Poneke is also wrong in chastising the world’s governments for taking action. And this, I think, is symptomatic of an all too common problem. When a threat arises, be it bird flu, or SARS or Y2K, and when we take action to prevent it from leading to catastrophe, the fact that a catastrophe doesn’t occur doesn’t mean that we were wrong to take action. Showing that a catastrophe didn’t occur isn't the same as showing that it wouldn’t had we not acted. And it seems particularly arrogant to criticise those people who may have stopped it from occurring because, hah hah, it didn’t occur. Even when action was, ultimately, not necessary this doesn’t mean that – in a world of risk and uncertainty – we were wrong to follow the precautionary principle either.