Astroturf is made of people
Feb. 10th, 2005 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinA couple of remarks on the environmental-science-and-politics front (note, as usual, that I am not an environmental scientist, but I like to think I've spent a lot of time observing the scientific community and its interactions with the rest of the world):
1. Apparently the line that "everyone thought there was going to be an ice age in the Seventies; these climate people, you can't believe anything they say" is still going around (RealClimate ran an article debunking it a while back).
Aside from it being fairly irrelevant anyway (even if it were true, it's on the order of "First scientists say the Sun goes around the Earth, then Earth goes around the Sun! Which is it? MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!!!") the striking thing about it is that I personally remember it not being true, and surely people who are older than I am can concur. There might have been some fretting about ice ages in popular media, but people did know and worry about CO2-induced global warming back then; this isn't some recent fad. The general circulation models weren't there yet, but you could get the order of magnitude of the effect from basic back-of-the-envelope calculations. (I like that the article from which George Will pulled his damning quote about glaciation had a sentence completely destroying his contention in the previous paragraph. If anyone needed further proof that Will is the King of Hacks, this is it.)
But what I just remembered is that there's evidence even from pop culture: I'm pretty sure that global warming is part of the background of the movie Soylent Green.
2. Is Rachel Carson responsible for more deaths than Hitler? You might not be surprised to hear that the answer is "no". However, I've been hearing this nonsense going around in Real Life, so I suppose I should mention that Tim Lambert has been having a lovely time ripping the Environmentalists Killed Millions By Banning DDT story to pieces. I feel slightly embarrassed, because this is one that I actually thought might have a grain of truth to it the first time I encountered it. Not really, though, for reasons Lambert explains.
One of his commenters expressed bafflement that anti-environmentalists would be so obsessed with DDT in the first place, given its marginal utility for the purposes for which the Tech Central Station crowd have been advocating it. What's going on here is actually a common pattern among scientific cranks, which in its normal manifestation I call Experimentum Crucis Syndrome. It's the idea that an entire discipline rests on a single historical claim, which, once destroyed, will kick the supports out from under the whole thing. For anti-relativity cranks, it's the Michelson-Morley experiment: you'll see people writing long, tangled screeds about problems with Michelson-Morley as if that were the only thing convincing any modern scientist of the reality of special relativity. Here, it's Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which provided much early inspiration for the environmental movement. Silent Spring was famous for helping get DDT banned for many uses. Refute the DDT thesis, so the thinking goes, and all of environmentalism collapses like the horde of zombies when you decapitate the Head Zombie.
1. Apparently the line that "everyone thought there was going to be an ice age in the Seventies; these climate people, you can't believe anything they say" is still going around (RealClimate ran an article debunking it a while back).
Aside from it being fairly irrelevant anyway (even if it were true, it's on the order of "First scientists say the Sun goes around the Earth, then Earth goes around the Sun! Which is it? MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!!!") the striking thing about it is that I personally remember it not being true, and surely people who are older than I am can concur. There might have been some fretting about ice ages in popular media, but people did know and worry about CO2-induced global warming back then; this isn't some recent fad. The general circulation models weren't there yet, but you could get the order of magnitude of the effect from basic back-of-the-envelope calculations. (I like that the article from which George Will pulled his damning quote about glaciation had a sentence completely destroying his contention in the previous paragraph. If anyone needed further proof that Will is the King of Hacks, this is it.)
But what I just remembered is that there's evidence even from pop culture: I'm pretty sure that global warming is part of the background of the movie Soylent Green.
2. Is Rachel Carson responsible for more deaths than Hitler? You might not be surprised to hear that the answer is "no". However, I've been hearing this nonsense going around in Real Life, so I suppose I should mention that Tim Lambert has been having a lovely time ripping the Environmentalists Killed Millions By Banning DDT story to pieces. I feel slightly embarrassed, because this is one that I actually thought might have a grain of truth to it the first time I encountered it. Not really, though, for reasons Lambert explains.
One of his commenters expressed bafflement that anti-environmentalists would be so obsessed with DDT in the first place, given its marginal utility for the purposes for which the Tech Central Station crowd have been advocating it. What's going on here is actually a common pattern among scientific cranks, which in its normal manifestation I call Experimentum Crucis Syndrome. It's the idea that an entire discipline rests on a single historical claim, which, once destroyed, will kick the supports out from under the whole thing. For anti-relativity cranks, it's the Michelson-Morley experiment: you'll see people writing long, tangled screeds about problems with Michelson-Morley as if that were the only thing convincing any modern scientist of the reality of special relativity. Here, it's Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which provided much early inspiration for the environmental movement. Silent Spring was famous for helping get DDT banned for many uses. Refute the DDT thesis, so the thinking goes, and all of environmentalism collapses like the horde of zombies when you decapitate the Head Zombie.