Politically incorrect guide (PIG)

Back in mid-Feburary I saw Christopher C. Horner interviewed on Daily Show with Jon Stewart about his new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. I was hopeful that he would take a middle road and function as a bridge between the two camps. I was quickly disillusioned. He spent his time parroting the usual attack the messenger distortions such as global warming is a left wing communist tree hugger conspiracy. He repeats the charge that the climate scientists can't be trusted because they are just trying to get more funding. What he didn't make clear in the interview is that Mr. Horner is NOT a scientist. He is a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C. and a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He's an expert on global warming legislation and regulation. So he has a conflict of interest himself. In fine lawyerly fashion, Mr. Horner skirts the truth as he points to the growth of the Greenland Ice sheet as a refutation against global warming. He neglects to mention that the scientist who wrote the study came to opposite conclusion -- temperature increase led to increased precipitation, leading to ice sheet growth. He also has no problem citing Michael Chrichton as scientific support. Unfortunately Chrichton got his information on global warming science for his novel State of Fear from persons also responsible for the tobacco industry's effort to obscure the relationship between cancer and smoking.

Even more damning is his publisher. The Politically Incorrect Guide (PIG) series covers a wide range of subjects - Science, Islam, Darwinism and intelligent design, and American history. All of these texts suffer from similar distortions and misinformation. Such as the American War Between the States was not principally about slavery. Or that global warming is caused by the sun. And intelligent design is more scientific than Darwinism. The Pandas Thumb has reviewed the whole collection.

Spring has come.

I've been lax lately. Spring has come to Colorado and its been hard to sit down the blog.

Zaius nation gave a nice link to two of my blogs. If you haven't checked him out, he's got a great site ranging from politics to pop culture.

The main subject of this site, is the human capability for denial. It amazes me how vehemently perfectly intelligent and educated people deny Global warming. Its not like they have a problem with evolution or smoking links to cancer. Still they cling desperately to any thread that supports the way they want the world to be. Its as if the pro-smoking crowd said there is no cancer. And the tactics are the same, go after the messenger, not the message. At this point we should be having a discussion about what we're willing to do, not whether or not its happening.