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Monday 22 November 2021

Unsophisticated



Unsophisticated arguments can entertainingly strong and especially entertaining when we are not supposed to notice how strong they are. Sometimes strong but simple arguments have to be dismissed as unsophisticated to discourage even the incurious from picking up on them. 

For example, as we drive on and on towards Peak Tedium it is still worth recalling that prominent royals such as Prince Charles, David Attenborough and Princess Nut Nut have a theory that driving around in cars warms up the outside world. The unsophisticated may call it global warming. The more sophisticated appear to vary their terminology depending on the impression they wish to make.

Yet a moment or two spent considering this royally approved notion casts a good deal of unsophisticated doubt on it. If we had really discovered that driving around in cars causes a tiny amount of global warming we’d reduce the tax on cars with huge engines to keep the effect going. Cars with titchy little engines would be taxed heavily and we teach children to point at them and laugh.

We’d have to do something about bicycles too, because they don’t emit any CO2. Wind turbines and solar panels would have to go, or at least attract punitive taxes.

In a nutshell, if we really believed that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes a modest amount of global warming them we’d be pumping the stuff out as hard as we can go. A tiny bit of warmth plus the agricultural benefits of more CO2 in the atmosphere – yes we’d be grabbing that effect with both hands.

I recently did a unsophisticated check on twenty miles of motorway. At a steady speed of 60mph, how many cars did I overtake as they kept their speed down to minimise fossil fuel consumption? None is the answer, but you already guessed that.

To a unsophisticated approximation, nobody believes the official climate change narrative. Nobody ever did believe it. The unsophisticated noticed those private jets at COP26 though.

6 comments:

Andy5759 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andy5759 said...

When I'm discussing climate change with a believer my favourite wind ups is that co2 is plant food. I point out that at times earth had much higher volumes of co2 from volcanism, this led to gigantism in flora and fauna. In short life thrived, ferns grew as tall as houses, brontosaurus ate these and grew enormous, carnivores fed on them and grew. Then, after time, the carbon got trapped in the ground and under the sea. Life became poorer, big things became small or just died off, a sort of extinction event. Thanks to technology we can now release all that carbon so that life will thrive on earth once more. It's amazing what twaddle some people will believe. It's also possibly close to the truth.

Sam Vega said...

There are two interesting facts about anthropogenic global warming. The first one is that it might not be true, even though we are relentlessly told that it is. I can't get much purchase on this due to my intellectual training (I'm not a scientist) so I just observe that interesting fact from a distance.

The second one I can get more purchase on, and it is that despite the fact that people claim to believe in anthropogenic global warming, many of them clearly don't believe it. They don't act as if it's true, and they don't have the knowledge and understanding to test whether it is true or not. They do more of the stuff that apparently causes climate change than I do (I live fairly frugally) and despite their claims they do not follow the example of the Goebbels family in their Berlin bunker by poisoning their children and then killing themselves. And when I act like I know more about science than I do, and question them on their beliefs, they are utterly stumped. One nice middle class lady was getting very stressy about methane (as a vegan, my soya consumption is apparently causing more methane to be produced) but when I asked her what methane is - an element or a compound? - she was utterly stumped and called me a "climate change denier".

So apparently, lots of people claim to believe what they don't and can't believe, and get very angry when challenged about it. I'm beginning to wonder what they actually believe about race, immigration, gay rights, world peace and whether they love their spouses...

Scrobs. said...

I remember (forgotten who it was) an article about a 'great thinker' years ago, and wondering what that sort of person actually did for a living!

After my three-score years and ten, I've really given up, and just try to 'do' instead of 'thinking'...

...while I remember...

Bill Sticker said...

I read a statement from the White House yesterday comparing CO2 in the atmosphere to a pane of glass. Presumably they'd never heard of Physicist A N Wilsons famous experiment back in the 1930's when he tested this very hypothesis.

The powers that be try to tell us that they're following 'the science'. Yet the only place I can find their 'science' is in mathematical projections which have missed the mark by orders of magnitude for over forty years.

A K Haart said...

Andy - on the same lines, it could be worth pointing out that the dinosaurs in the film "Jurassic Park" would probably not have enough vegetation to eat because atmospheric CO2 is too low to stimulate the required growth rate. They would just die and the film should have shown an island full of huge rotting corpses.

Sam - I think your second fact is the powerful one rather than the science, because people clearly don't believe in climate change at a personal influence level. It seems to be more of an allegiance than a belief, but it comes with an allegiance to the justifications too. They can't be prised apart.

I find that having a scientific background doesn't help much in these situations, because it isn't really a scientific belief or faith in the science. It feels more like a moral allegiance to me. People think less of you if you don't subscribe but don't really know why.

Scobs - apparently what they do now is hide themselves in universities which for some reason actually pay them. Should be the other way round in my view.

Bill - it's as if anything will do so long as it sounds like science to enough people. As if the whole thing is in the hands of people who don't really care if what they put out is garbage as long as enough people can't tell it is garbage.