Does it Hurt?

I got an email from a casual correspondent (not anyone I know well) a while back that has me shaking my head. While I haven’t written much about climate change here (even though I’m working on a climate change project for a museum right now), my note about preserving the Earth a few weeks back tripped a breaker in somebody’s mind and the lights went out.

So, the letter began by excoriating scientists who “believe” in global warming. Not even a “Hi, I read your entry and I have a few comments to make” opening. No, this person just plowed right in and began flinging poo. First, the writer listed a series of statements that he/she said were made by proponents of global warming that were (in the letter-writer’s opinion) false and made only to get more funding (the letter-writer’s interpretation). No, the person didn’t say WHY they were false. Apparently it was enough to just get out the world FALSE in big, black letters with lots of exclamation points after it.

The person did send me some links to “research” that he/she said disproved global warming. The first one on the list turned out to be a site that pretty said verbatim what was written in the email to me. At the bottom of the email message, the person suggested that scientists should be more “open to new ideas” and not closed-minded to people who disagree with them.

Okay, so I got the idea that this person doesn’t think that global warming is real. Fair enough — everybody’s entitled to their opinion. But, this person’s opinion wasn’t his/her own. It was basically a rehash of a website that he/she had read (and was graceless enough to point out to me as a “scientific source”). The site misquoted several scientists, actually putting words in their mouths they’d never said. Then it took them to task for what it claimed they said (rather than what they actually said).

And my letter-writer was whining about closed-mindedness on the part of scientists?

It was entertaining for about one minute. But, I have less patience these days with people who don’t use their heads or prefer to let others do their thinking for them, particularly when it comes to discussing science. Let me just say that the human mind is meant to be educated and exercised, not rented out or mismanaged by people whose degrees are in psychoceramics.