Something I hear far too often for my liking and which annoys me to no end is the blustery reply, “Well in the ’70s they thought there was global cooling, so nyah!” OK, I added the ‘nyah’. But you know the argument. It’s along the lines of ‘if scientists were wrong then, then you have just as much chance of being wrong now.’
After much thought, I feel the best reply is, “Shut up, you idiot, while you have the chance. If you talk any longer you may convince us that you’re retarded and not just stupid.”
This charming little logical fallacy is as annoying as it is persistent. But none of its spewers goes on to mention how we modeled climate change back in the 1970s. None of them bother to point out the lack of comprehensive computer models (tracking rain, but not clouds, for instance), weather satellites (SMS-1 wasn’t even launched until 1974), global networks and… well… fucking supercomputers! The ECMWF got their first Cray-1P in 1979, Wait… OK. My iMac just did as many operations in those few seconds as a Cray-1P could do in a day. Just imagine a room full of people doing this on paper or on computers with no more power than an iPhone.
But to really get this in perspective, let’s have Isaac Asimov say something pithy and wise in a couple of sentences that I couldn’t put down properly in a full page:
“… when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” - Isaac Asimov - The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 14 No. 1, Fall 1989
So, in a nutshell, we may not be 100% accurate in our predictions about climate change (and I encourage you to look into the recent re-affirmations and newly joined supporters of the data), but we’re far less wrong than we were in the past.
Now, shut up, you idiots. Or I’ll stick you on an ice floe from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf and hope a swimming polar bear eats you as you pass by.
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