Garbanzo Toons

Lying Like a What?

Everyone at the Detroit Free Press has hopped onto the global warming - uh - I mean climate change bandwagon, even their outdoor writer.

Recently, a right-wing talk show host was foaming at the mouth because former Vice President Al Gore got the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. According to that host, global warming is part of a liberal plot that eventually will lead to socialized medicine, which seemed a bit of a stretch.

But if you care about our natural resources, it's critical that you also understand that the threat global warming presents to our state, nation and world has nothing to do with political ideology.

Anyone who says that global warming is disputed by scientists is either hopelessly uninformed, in denial or lying. The tiny minority of scientists who still dispute the causes of it are funded mostly by groups such as the fossil fuel industry that face huge financial costs from cleaning up their acts.

So far, it's pretty typical leftist character assassination of anyone who dares contradict their theology.

If you learned you had cancer, whom would you listen to -- doctors who are experts in cancer treatment and are backed up by thousands of researchers around the world, or a radio jaw jockey who may never have taken a science course after the ninth grade and makes his living touting a political agenda for people who sell products that cause cancer?

Unfortunately, some people insist on confusing science with ideology, even though we don't have to look very far to find instances where this has resulted in setting back the march of human progress, or even utter disaster.

Throw in some turnspeak, a favorite propaganda technique of Islamists and their supporters. But what the heck, the Gore worshipers are allied with that crowd, so why not borrow their propaganda techniques?

But then he gets interesting.

You may never have heard of Trofim Lysenko, a Russian agronomist who in the 1920s rejected the theory of genetics, which was then at about the same stage as our understanding of global warming is today. Lysenko set out to prove that "Socialist" science, not "bourgeois genetics," could improve grain harvests, and his work was eagerly adopted by Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party.

It turned out that Lysenko's research was mostly faked or hopelessly flawed, and he set back Russian biological science by a generation. Even worse, his theories were adopted by Mao Tse-tung for China's "Great Leap Forward" in the 1960s, and the result was crop failures and famines that killed millions.

Do you want an immediate reason why we in Michigan should take global warming seriously? Bill Richardson, Democratic presidential hopeful and governor of New Mexico, said recently that we should have "a national water policy" and develop "a water delivery system" to enable drought-stricken states like his get help from Great Lakes states "awash with water."

Scientists at Columbia University's Earth Institute have predicted that "human-caused climate change is likely to lead to long periods of extreme drought throughout the American Southwest starting early this century."

Which side does he pick to show a pattern of outrageous lies? Yep, that's right, the side whose standard for truth is "fake, but accurate", that is, if they are presenting the fake. He could have added Walter Duranty, who famously won a Pulitzer for a series of articles claiming there were no famines in Stalin's Soviet Union and everything was peaches and cream throughout the motherland.

So if he ever gets around to complaining that the people on the Right are forging documents in order to destroy a person's life and career, will he use Dan Rather as an example?

Labels: Detroit Free Press, global warming

posted by Harry @ 8:02 PM