Heartland Institute Learning To Troll On Billboards 735
Fluffeh writes "The Heartland Institute is a lovely group of folks who take issue with mainstream climate science. They organize an annual get-together of like minded folk and talk trash about environmental change. 'The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society.' (That's from a press release!). Recently, when they were tricked by a researcher into sending him a lot of internal documents, they decided to go on the offensive and also get some more media attention. After all, any story is a good story, right? Launching a billboard with the Unabomber on it with the slogan 'I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?' was just the start, with the institute planning Fidel Castro, Charles Manson and possibly even Osama Bin Laden. That's when even their stout backers threatened to walk away, backing started to dry up — and it seems that common sense started to prevail — but only so far as to stop them from making their message too public."
They Never Even Said Those Things (Score:5, Interesting)
Fidel Castro, Charles Manson and possibly even Osama Bin Laden
Wow, I never knew that Ted Kaczynski and the above crew were quoted on Global Warming. So, upon reading the article I found that:
How did Heartland justify the comparison between murderers and tyrants and anyone who believed in global warming? "Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the 'mainstream' media, and liberal politicians say about global warming," according to the press release that announced the ads. It went on to claim that "[t]he people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society."
Wait, so you're telling me that you're putting pictures of some of recent history's most hated and feared men next to quotes about believing in Global Warming?
Congratulations, Heartland Institute, your argument is now so depraved that you've reduced yourselves to holding up pictures of Hitler in a public forum while pantomiming your opponents. Is that reductio ad ridiculum or is this so childish that people didn't even bother coming up with a Latin phrase for it?
So they won't mind if I put up a billboard that reads
"... and when this Earth is fucked
the free market will build us a better one."
(read more at www.heartland.org)
Non sequitur (Score:5, Interesting)
I dare bet the unabomber, Castro, Manson and Bin Laden all believe(d) in breathing air as well.
Does that make breathing air wrong all of a sudden?
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Questions (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL plenty of wrong assumptions under number 7. And you don't exhale fossil-sourced CO2. At least I don't.
And the warming around turbines is very localized. They stir up the air around them.
Re:They Never Even Said Those Things (Score:2, Interesting)
"you've reduced yourselves to holding up pictures of Hitler in a public forum while pantomiming your opponents"
I seem to recall environmentalists doing the same to Bush.
And no, I don't support heartland. I just don't support hypocrisy.
Re:They Never Even Said Those Things (Score:4, Interesting)
The only way to get the "denier" label is to oppose whatever socialist fascist corporate-kleptocracy solution that has been proposed as the only or final solution to the problem.
I disagree. I've been saying for the last few years now (even here on Slashdot) that while I completely agree with the science behind AGW, all of the solutions are naive and overly optimistic. It is really cute to think that you will get the entire world to agree to stop using the easiest resources available to them. We should be spending money on it, but it should be on predicting and mitigating the effects - trying to prevent it is foolishness. I want to know whether we should, in the next 50-100 years, be putting up seawalls and such or not. How high should this new levy be? Should we bother to rebuild this coastline after the next hurricane? This valley after the next flood?
That said, I hope someone proves me wrong. I've had people disagree with me - and I don't blame them, it's a pessimistic view of human nature. But I've never had the reaction you describe.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They Never Even Said Those Things (Score:5, Interesting)
Every one of the people that do not buy all (or part of) the whole AGW religion have been labelled "deniers" for 10 years now.
It is interesting that you mention this in relation to a story about Heartland Institute. It was this exact argument that made it apparent to me that there was a hand on the tiller of the anti-global warming movement. I wish I could remember the /. story when this happened, but there was one particular discussion about climate change when I noticed that out of the blue lots of different people had suddenly found themselves being offended by the term "denier". It seemed so unlikely that so many people would simultaneously become offended that at the time I thought that they must have been parroting a recent show of one of the conservative radio commentators.
But it made me pay attention to how the debate progressed in the ranks of the anti-AGW supporters. I began to wonder whether there was some checklist in the boardroom of a think tank (like Heartland) where they had listed what the next bit of FUD they were going to print in their next newsletter for their eager followers to claim as their own.
The funny thing about the "don't call me a denier" argument is that it is often used by right wing pundits who make a living denigrating their opposing side using labels like lefties, greenies, pinkos, communists, intelligentsia, ivory-tower academics, latte-sippers, chatting classes, liberals, alarmists and (apparently the next new term) "green-shirts". Actually, the last one is not really new; a quick google search on "climate green shirts" shows that it has been used for a few years now.
Still, good luck with your denialist gambit. Now it is true that the literal definition of the term is a very apt fit to what you are (more so than skeptic), and nobody using it was doing so to affiliate you with any other denialists. In fact the only people that bring up the holocaust are people like you.
But now you mention it, the holocaust deniers do share some traits with the anti-AGW supports like being against the weight of overwhelming expert opinion and the uncanny ability to be looking elsewhere when being shown evidence that they don't like.
Re:crazy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Read the article (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a variant the Gish Gallop, invented by (in)famous Creationist Duane Gish, whose chief means of winning debates was to throw so many things at an interlocutor that there was no way to deal with it in the time allotted. So many of the pseudo-skeptics tactics are pretty much based on the pioneering rhetorical games of the Creationists. In this case, you troll journals and repositories and look for anything that faintly looks like it might be anti-AGW and throw it out there, even when it turns out that the authors certainly do not make that case. You see, the amount of energy it takes to just throw articles out there is small compared to having to read through all the articles and references, thus it becomes a sort of rhetorical economics.
The other tactic that links in to this is to ignore when you've been shown the article in question doesn't falsify AGW, and then just keep throwing it out there anyways. This is pretty common, and why you will see some pseudo-skeptics throwing out long-debunked claims as if they were somehow still relevant.
Re:crazy (Score:4, Interesting)
Link: I strongly recommend downloading and reading Bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians" [umanitoba.ca]. In this book (75% scientific footnotes you can skip, 25% mindblowing clearly written sociology research) he makes a clear distinction between "right-wing authoritarian followers" (the main topic of the book) on the one hand (because you can't have a right-wing movement, dictatorship etc. without all those people who just neatly obey what TPTB instruct them to do), and "right-wing authoritarian leaders", who are a rare breed of people who have no scruples at all and happen to have found they are really good at gaining power over the backs of the "right-wing authoritarian followers" which they manipulate and enthuse.
Joke: This is a lame joke, I'm not exactly sure why I'm telling it here on Slashdot, but it felt appropriate somehow so indulge me.
It is a stormy night. Two men are driving on a motorway through the storm, looking stressed-out, tired and wary of the road. The autoradio is on softly but suddenly it gets interrupted by a blaring emergency traffic report:
"Attention! A wrong-way driver(*) has been detected on the E0 road driving northward! Keep to the right and try to signal the driver with your lights!"
Says the driver to his passenger: "ONE wrong-way driver?!?! Hah! I've had to dodge at least TWENTY of those idiots already!"
(*) the joke is marginally more funny in Dutch where the word is "spookrijder" -- "ghost rider".
Re:crazy (Score:5, Interesting)
There are probably a couple more, but these are the ones that came to mind first. Science is and has always been evolving.
I totally agree that we are f*cking up earth big time and that it would really be a good idea to conserve energy, and stop burning up resources like there is no tomorrow. The data shows that we changed the atmosphere and it shows things are changing, but acting would be inconvenient and expensive (somewhat) so we ignore the problem.
On the other hand , dismissing outright proof because it doesn't fit your world view isn't such a new idea either.
Re:crazy (Score:3, Interesting)
Why wasn't the science good enough for him?
Because he realized that the majority of American voters are morons who can be easily persuaded by propaganda.
Re:crazy (Score:2, Interesting)
When you can't face reality, you are a denier of reality. Period.
When Copernicus showed a much simpler model of planetary motion and later Galileo observed it, they were labeled heretics by the church. It wasn't until John Paul II that the wrong perpetuated by the church was righted and the Roman Catholic church basically said they were wrong and science was right. This is why Roman Catholic church does not challenge science anymore (like they should not), but reserve their business to the world of the paranormal. The pope even indicated that evolution is not incompatible with christian beliefs - they don't want to repeat the "Galileo incident".
Now, we have similar deniers about reality, this being AGW. Something that has been shown to be increasingly more likely for decades.
So yes, deniers can't show that earth is not warming. They can't show that man is not responsible. All they can do is put labels on reality and say it can't be happening if they believe it hard enough. HTFU and deal with it, deniers!
Re:What are the roots of anti-science politics? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Reagan era, science meant high technology and the US was riding high on its scientific and technological superiority in many ways. Science supported many "conservative" views (these simplistic labels have changed meanings since then though), it was science that was going to help the Strategic Defense Initiative, it was science that put us ahead of the Soviet bloc countries. Science was a friend.
Over time though, science is no longer a friend. Science tells us to conserve and that worries economic free market "high growth" people, that oil is going to run out, that we might be in for some bad times if we don't change behavior, etc.
Basically when science has evidence to support one side then that side promotes it, when science has evidence that undermines one side then they oppose it. Science isn't political.