Monday, December 07, 2009

A good primer

Of the Global Warming Hoax coming out of the CRU. The one thing that people understand, and it's something I've used in the past when confronted with a Warmista - if the graphs put out by the global warming crowd are so accurate, where is the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age?

I normally get blank stares at that point. And when I tell them that it used to be warm enough for the Vikings to farm Greenland but now it's too cold to do so, I get more blank stares. When I point out that they used to be able to grow grapes for wine in England, and that hasn't happened in centuries because it's been too cold, people start getting upset. At me. And when I start talking about the Little Ice Age and it's affect on Europe, they get openly hostile.

It's their religion, you see. And I just used some plain, simple facts to knock it down.

Look, I'm not a scientist. I read these reports, and I have to go over them two, three, four times to make sense of the data, simply because I'm not trained in reading straight data and understanding it immediately. It takes me some time. And I'm not the only one in America who's like this, OK? Give me a five paragraph Op-Order and I can pull relevant information out quicker than you can blink, but charts with multiple data sources and equations and formulas take me a while.

But once it's been digested, I can condense it down into simple terms and use it. I'm not the best communicator, but I can get my point across. Talk about tree rings and ice core samples and a lot of people's eyes start to glaze over. They become disinterested. But mention the fact that the Vikings used to have farming communities in Greenland, and that it's been too cold to have those farms for about a thousand years, and people's ears perk up. They can relate to farming, most of them, even if the only farm they've ever been on was a 10X10 garden plot. It's something they can understand. Mention that the Little Ice Age was one of the contributing factors to the Black Plague, and people start listening. It's something they can understand.

I'm willing to bet that most folks still couldn't tell you exactly what the lies are in the CRU data. But at least now they know they've been lied to. That's the first step. Reading the American Thinker piece would be a good second step.

No comments: