Becuase with anything, scepticism is a good thing. blind acceptance becuase one person said so, is a little to close to religious dogma for a lot of kiwis.
Also what he espoused in an inconvenient truth as total fact is based (in a lot of cases) on fairly spurious 'facts' from people with a vested interest in the 'warming' industry, ie they get their funding and money from continuing to show what their funders want.
i;ve read very good reports (with a lot more referencing than many of his supporters use) to show how a) either what he is saying is way out of proportion, b) just plain false, c) not supported by anywhere enough evidence.
What leads me to give more credence to the sceptics is that fact that there have been calls to jail or at least revoke the licenses of scientists who are sceptical, or as they call them, 'climate change deniers' (which is an allusion to holocaust denial). If the evidence was strong enough, then you would not need to silence the critics, their lack of counter evidence would make them look foolish enough.
While i have seen a lot of correlation spouted in defense of climate change, i have seen very little causation, or actual links. and if it is happening, i have also seen very little actual causational evidence showing it is mostly man made, and not just weather being odd.
now if you are perfectly happy beleiving everything he says, then thats cool, i am happy for you. but we are aloud to disagree, its not tall poppy syndrome, or 'denial', its just not beleiving every word he says, or more mildly, beleoving there is other evidence out there that paints a different view.
Scepticism and dissent are good things, intolerance of scepticism or differing views is totalatarian, and that is certainly not what NZ is about.
this does not mean that i am all for burning gas just becuase i can, or concreting the planet (we recyle etc). i just don;t think its as bad as Al gore says, or that we have as big an impact as he would like to think.
BTW, what i do every day helps alter peoples lives in a good way, so sorry if i am not as impressed becuase his good PR job made some people take the bus.
Alan
talula - good post. nice work.
Posted by morgue at March 5, 2007 03:09 PMI echo Morgue - excellent piece of media analysis T.
Would love to respond to C1 but it's too unintelligible and gives no references, so there hardly seems any point.
Posted by suraya at March 6, 2007 05:06 AMGee thanks suraya, condescend much?
since i am not trying to prove Al gore is wrong, just that there are sceptics to his work, and why i beleive scepticism is a good thing, i can hardly see why i need to provide references.
unitellgible? your call, if english is your second language i could understand that, so will let it slide.
looking back i see no references to prove the following;
"he is making a real difference in the world because he cares about what he believes in."
or
"Because Al Gore has arguably done the impossible and made people all over the world care about global warming"
but then the comment was not about whether he was correct or not, just whether we should be allowed to criticise him.
However since the original post has made the leap to assume he is correct and everything he says in his movie is correct, why is the onus on proof on the sceptic? should it not be on the one positing the theory in the first place.
i am happy to find some counter arguments and references if there are specific points someone wants to reference that makes them beleive that Al Gore is completely correct and above reproach or scepticism.
If good media analysis is linking to various views on one subject and then making huge assumptions and leaps to other blanket statements about the person (ie, gore uses a lot of energy, but its green, here are the links, oh btw he is a great person who has helped make a difference int eh world, and we should leave him be, there is no proof of the second half of the comment, but its taken for granted), then forgive my disdain for media analysis.
hopefully you can understand this post.
if you can;t try dictionary.com or a thesaurus.
Posted by Alan at March 6, 2007 07:31 AMInteresting post, Jenni, and follow-up comments. I understand Alan's comments completely - a dose of healthy skepticism never hurt anyone, as long as both skeptics and true beleivers are willing to listen to each other and actually reappraise their situation in light of arguments or evidence put forward.
I think that discussion of whether Al Gore's (possibly evangelically communicated - I still haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth) message is accurate or not is missing the main thrust of Jenni's post - NZ LOVES IT SOME TALL POPPY SYNDROME.
This is not a new phenomenon, but it does kinda suck. The presenters on the show mentioned had not seen Gore's movie, nor did they appear to know all that much about his message, but they were delighted to see a tall poppy cut down.
Now, there's a healthy dose of irony in the fact that Gore uses lots of leccy in his house, and irony is a goodly form of humour. But enjoying seeing successful people falter does tend to carry a whiff of sour grapes, or jealousy, or mean-spiritedness. Tall Poppy Syndrome doesn't really have a positive side to it in the same way that healthy skepticism does - sure, it may be enjoyable to laugh at how the mighty have fallen (or used lots of electricity), but it's not a habit that I personally want to develop or promote. To summarise:
Tall Poppy Syndrome = Not My Cup of Tea.
Posted by Matt at March 6, 2007 08:44 AMAlan wrote:
"unitellgible? your call, if english is your second language i could understand that, so will let it slide."
Heh. Heh heh. Bwa ha ha!
"hopefully you can understand this post.
"if you can;t try dictionary.com or a thesaurus."
Use a spellchecker before you condescend, dumb-ass.
Posted by Pearce at March 6, 2007 09:20 AMWithout getting into the science argument here (I'll freely admit I've not educated myself on the matter so could only comment in the broadest of terms)...
Yeah, the tall-poppy approach reeks of cheap-shot journalism. It's pretty sad, although it's in keeping with the notion that it should be okay to question politicians and influential figures rather than just accept whatever they say regardless of what they do.
However, as cheap shots go, it's one of the oldest and cheapest bits of flaming to attack someone's typing/spelling/grammar before attacking their argument (or if you're particularly petty, *instead* of attacking their argument).
Inadvertently hitting ";" instead of "'" (for example) does not completely invalidate an opinion.
Posted by Rachel at March 6, 2007 10:15 AMYes I think we should be a little skeptical, but not a particularly persuasive way of putting it. I would just like to share the most affecting part of An Inconvenient Truth, for me anyway.
The photos. *All* the glaciers and lakes which have been reduced to almost nothing. If you have time Alan, find me some other cause, or I will chalk it up to be just as bad as it really is.
Oh, and please tell me where my youthful summers have gone, because I was a younging very recently and in the last ten years the weather has gone to complete shite. I believe that it is just as bad as it has been presented by this man.
Posted by Nick P at March 6, 2007 02:36 PMRachel: Point taken, and I would not usually stoop to this sort of "cheap shot" but y'know what? He asked for it.
Quite frankly, if someone is going to make snarky comments about "English as a second language" and how people should use a dictionary to "understand" what they have to say, they should at least proof-read their comments before submitting them.
I agree that making a typo does not invalidate an opinion, but I assert that claiming someone else's reading comprehension is lacking in a comment that's full of typographical errors just makes you look like an ass.
Posted by Pearce at March 6, 2007 03:07 PMOK, now that I have established myself as a big fat meanie for picking on Al's typographical errors, maybe I'll address what he said instead of how he said it.
"Because with anything, scepticism is a good thing. blind acceptance because one person said so, is a little to close to religious dogma for a lot of kiwis."
Honesty is also a good thing. If someone reports that Al Gore's house uses a lot of electricity and uses this as a way to call him a hypocrite, but does not mention that they know the electricity he uses comes from his own solar panels and wind power instead of from the power grid, I would argue that they are not being sceptical but rather they are being dishonest. It is sort of like saying "Frank is a killer" because someone leapt in front of the truck that Frank was driving.
"I've read very good reports (with a lot more referencing than many of his supporters use) to show how a) either what he is saying is way out of proportion, b) just plain false, c) not supported by anywhere enough evidence."
Cool, can you give us some examples? This sort of information would be useful to know.
"What leads me to give more credence to the sceptics is that fact that there have been calls to jail or at least revoke the licenses of scientists who are sceptical, or as they call them, 'climate change deniers' (which is an allusion to holocaust denial)."
Who is calling for this? Al Gore? Jenni? Sean Penn? Someone who was wearing a tinfoil hat and carrying a sign that says "I'm growing fins"? This is the kind of thing I think you really should provide references for.
"While I have seen a lot of correlation spouted in defence of climate change, I have seen very little causation, or actual links. and if it is happening, I have also seen very little actual causational evidence showing it is mostly man made, and not just weather being odd."
Causative evidence is often very difficult to establish, particularly in a situation like this when we are talking about weather patterns across the whole planet. I'd be interested to know what sort of evidence you would consider properly causative as oppose to correlative in a situation such as this.
"now if you are perfectly happy believing everything he says, then that's cool, I am happy for you."
Could you possibly point out the part in Jenni's post - or in any of her previous posts - where she says something synonymous with "I believe everything that Al Gore says"? I must be a wee bit dim, because I can't actually find it.
"Scepticism and dissent are good things, intolerance of scepticism or differing views is totalitarian, and that is certainly not what NZ is about."
Please forgive MY scepticism here, but I think this is perhaps a bit over the top. I didn't read anything in Jenni's post that I would class as "intolerance of scepticism or differing views." It looked to me like she was clarifying an issue, suggesting some possible motivations for some people omitting facts in reportage, and expressing annoyance that people would be lead to judge a situation by their lack of knowledge of said facts. That doesn't sound too different from what you are suggesting - that people who are convinced of climate change should check out alternative viewpoints and weigh them up as well. Calling it "totalitarian" seems to me to be a bit, well, silly.
"BTW, what I do every day helps alter peoples lives in a good way, so sorry if I am not as impressed because his good PR job made some people take the bus."
I'm glad you're doing the good work, whatever that may be.
"since I am not trying to prove Al gore is wrong, just that there are sceptics to his work, and why I believe scepticism is a good thing, I can hardly see why I need to provide references."
Fair enough, but if you actually want to convince anyone of your arguments you might want to consider going the extra distance rather than just saying "It's up to you to prove that I'm wrong."
Also, you've said a few times that you think scepticism is a good thing, but I don't think you've actually said why. I'll give my own opinion.
Healthy scepticism, which I view as the challenging of assumptions and the exposure of flawed evidence, is something I think is essential. Scepticism based on something along the lines of "I don't want to believe that therefore I just won't" is less helpful, but it is something I have noticed, and forms its own kind of dogma. (I'm not accusing you of that by any means, just clarifying my own position.)
"but then the comment was not about whether he was correct or not, just whether we should be allowed to criticise him."
I don't think you are correct. I think the original post was an expression of vexation at a particular way of criticising him, and an expression of the opinion that he should not be criticised just for the sake of criticising him. Jenni pointed out that the information used to criticise Al Gore was incomplete in quite a crucial fashion, and that the people who criticised him had an agenda.
Posted by Pearce at March 7, 2007 08:53 AM