Monday, December 27, 2004
Laugh with Rush: Scientists! Ha Ha, they're such jerks; PLUS!! Rush Limbaugh comments on the tsunami catastrophe
Rush Limbaugh, twice-divorced drug-addict conservative hero and welfare claimant, talks a lot of crap. Doubtless, he's not even finished with the lovingly Christian insinuation that the Clintons are mass murderers, muttering about 'Fort Marcy Park' to the gathering rage of his not at all confused listeners (see numbers 71 and 72). But what Rush Limbaugh talks the most crap about is science.
Rush's essential tactic is to find two 'scientific' statements that appear to contradict one other (or can be misrepresented to), and thus prove it's all a load of hooey. Creationists do this to argue that 'evolution' is 'just a theory with its own problems' and therefore no more valid than the 'theory' of creation. Primarily, Rush does it to show that human activity is not causing climate change (although 'science' in general, particularly as mediated by hacks, is always a ripe target).
Consider this summary of Rush's 'opinion' on the environment, [from his own website 19/9/ 2003]:
the world is getting colder. Crazy scientists! They spend most of their time drawing attention to their wacko anti-capitalist cause by claiming that the world is getting warmer! It's like watching Laurel & Hardy.
The newsweek article is from 1975.
In 2004, Laurel & Hardy seemed to have got their act together. If you are in any doubt, read Naomi Oreskes at Science magazine.
Relevant quotes:
"Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain... ..Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case."
"In its most recent assessment, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".. ..
IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements."
So Rush is wrong. Big surprise. Not by accident, however, but deliberately and maliciously: He had to go out of his way to reach these conclusions; via a 30-year-old magazine article. And this is not over minor issue. He's not misremembered a batting average.
And Rush isn't finished. There's more liberal evil to fight. Rush digs deep, going lower than anyone has gone before in search of liberal evil. On a day when 40,000 people have died, most of them children, Rush proclaims:
"Human Beings Cannot, Do Not Cause Tsunamis"
Do you think he's found a parchment claiming otherwise, or a medieval chapbook?
I hate those liberal soothsayers! HATE them! HATE THEM!
Rush's essential tactic is to find two 'scientific' statements that appear to contradict one other (or can be misrepresented to), and thus prove it's all a load of hooey. Creationists do this to argue that 'evolution' is 'just a theory with its own problems' and therefore no more valid than the 'theory' of creation. Primarily, Rush does it to show that human activity is not causing climate change (although 'science' in general, particularly as mediated by hacks, is always a ripe target).
Consider this summary of Rush's 'opinion' on the environment, [from his own website 19/9/ 2003]:
"Here's this hurricane stirring up the ocean hundreds and hundreds of miles away. We are fools if we think that what we do as humans effects climate,weather and everything else".Today he has excelled himself. He has found an article from Newsweek which says
the world is getting colder. Crazy scientists! They spend most of their time drawing attention to their wacko anti-capitalist cause by claiming that the world is getting warmer! It's like watching Laurel & Hardy.
The newsweek article is from 1975.
In 2004, Laurel & Hardy seemed to have got their act together. If you are in any doubt, read Naomi Oreskes at Science magazine.
Relevant quotes:
"Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain... ..Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case."
"In its most recent assessment, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".. ..
IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements."
So Rush is wrong. Big surprise. Not by accident, however, but deliberately and maliciously: He had to go out of his way to reach these conclusions; via a 30-year-old magazine article. And this is not over minor issue. He's not misremembered a batting average.
And Rush isn't finished. There's more liberal evil to fight. Rush digs deep, going lower than anyone has gone before in search of liberal evil. On a day when 40,000 people have died, most of them children, Rush proclaims:
"Human Beings Cannot, Do Not Cause Tsunamis"
Do you think he's found a parchment claiming otherwise, or a medieval chapbook?
I hate those liberal soothsayers! HATE them! HATE THEM!
