Nuggets of Disinformation.

This stuff is a little old, but worth getting into. The climate change issue has pretty much fallen by the wayside for the last year and a half, for obvious reasons. But its important to be aware of what's happening in this debate; especially to be able to tell information from disinformation.

When someone tries to form an opinion on something they don't fully comprehend, they often rely on anecdotal evidence to make up their minds, and they don't really think that much more about it after that. I've gone back and forth on climate change a few times that way, until I finally got sick of that and really sank my teeth into some hard information. And the case at this point appears to be convincing that human activities are producing co2 which is in turn causing temperatures to rise. But...

Since climate change is an extremely complex scientific phenomenon, there's ample opportunity for bad actors to slip little nuggets of disinformation into the debate that, when not vetted carefully, can be persuasive enough to push someone to one side or the other.

Here's a fine example:



Phelim McAleer, producer of "NEJW", paid a visit to Lou Dobbs last week and had a few nuggets to bury:



So McAleer says that since the hottest year on record was back in 1998, the globe has been actually cooling ever since. He backs this up with an idiotic anecdote about people supposedly growing wine in Britain at some point in the past. Rubbish.



Climate Clock of the Week with Peter Sinclair is a good source for fact-backed analysis of nuggets like this. The problem is that even though McAleer's argument is a proven fraud, its still a victory for him in that that nugget and that anecdote have been freshly introduced to probably thousands more susceptible minds.

And now that I've watched it again, its actually Lou Dobbs that first introduces this nonsense into the conversation! To think, at the beginning of the interview, Lou Dobbs wondered aloud why we just don't deal with the "salient and crystal clear?" on this issue. It only took him another minute in the program to demonstrate that he was one of the reasons why.