Lazy Sunday # 291: The Twitter Trolls

While most of you were reading my insightful as always Lazy Sunday post last Sunday morning, I was surfing the news and came across an article stating that the latest UN report on Climate Change (due in about a week) would state that somebody mighta screwed up.

No, it’s not that the planet hasn’t gone (or isn’t going) through a warming phase (as it has many times in the past), just that the computer models in use appear to have been flawed and we weren’t warming at anything even close to the massive civilization ending rate many of the scientific or famous have been predicting.

Now, I admit I’ve always been a little sceptical about the predictions of Al Gore and David Suzuki. That’s partly because the former constantly counters the rise of the oceans by purchasing even more beach front property –- and the latter appears to have gone off the rails, declaring that Canada is “full” and doesn’t need any more people coming here from the rest of the world.

I’ve also looked somewhat askance at the myriad doomsday predictions of those declaring the planet’s end days are upon us. Depending on who you choose to believe and on which day, where you live will either be under 30 feet of water, an arid wasteland or infested with poisonous reptiles and insects from the jungles of Borneo for which neither you nor your dog have any natural defense…

Beyond immediately paying down your carbon footprint.

So anyway, I posted what I’d read on Facebook, and moments later was inundated with messages of derision, shame and revulsion. Not only did I get excoriated for merely directing people to some information, but it was made clear the source was false, the media involved notorious at spreading lies –- and maybe I needed to be sent somewhere for re-education.

Over the last week, most other media, even those sympathetic to the Climate Change cause, have reported the same story and the UN released a preview of their report confirming it as well.

Included in that was that several CC scientists had requested that the computer model debacle be expunged from publication –- no doubt in the interest of expanding our knowledge on the subject.

And some took the opportunity to state that the planet is not warming less, it’s just that “the warming” has retreated into the depths of the oceans –- I presume where it will soon drive Godzilla and the Kraken to the surface thrashing our once safe coastal cities into rubble.

At any rate, we’ll all have the UN Report soon and then we can decide whether the Science on all of this was imperfect or, in fact, the issue is settled, beyond question and it’s time to start paying into those carbon exchanges, which like some modern day Papal dispensation will make all the bad stuff quickly go away.

But the big question that arose for me from all this is –- where did we make the societal turn back to the Middle Ages when anybody who didn’t talk exactly like us or espoused an alternate point of view has become some kind of heretic who needs to be burned at the stake?

I think Bill Maher has the answer.

Enjoy Your Sunday.