Well, that little Expelled! movie is getting a little bit of attention, it seems. I saw ads for it on CNN (surprising), Fox News (very, depressingly, absolutely unsurprising), and Discovery Channel (horrifying). Of course, Ben Stein began to tarnish in my eyes when he became a regular Fox contributor, redeemed himself with very funny performances in Fairly Oddparents, then dropped off the radar of my respect with this movie. Not, I’m sure, that he will wake up sobbing at the prospect at having lost my respect. His bank balance will take care of any lingering qualms he might have in that regard. I understand Fox News Channel pays a fair bit to its contributors, too… why else would Dick Morris be there? (Except that Fox hates the Clintons more than he does?)
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised about the ad appearing on Discovery Channel, though… after all, they continue to shove AGW down our throats on a regular basis, joined now by NGC and History Channel. They have large numbers of worthy talking heads all real scientists, saying “There is no debate”, which, considering several hundred scientists are doing just that, is pretty ludicrous now.
They still harp on about the polar bears being endangered, and how terrible it is that the US Government wants to take them off the protected list as part of their horrific scheme to claim that AGW is a myth, despite the fact that the figures show that the Polar Bear population has increased 90% since 1980. Yes. 90 percent!
In NGC’s “Last Days on Earth” special, Global Warming was the “NUMBER 1 THREAT TO ALL LIFE ON EARTH!!!!”, ahead of asteroid impact. This despite the fact that even the most dire projections raise the temperature far less than the Triassic Global Desert event, which only managed to wipe out 60% of life, and Asteroid impacts are a lot more common than we imagined only 10 years ago, and Toutatis is going to pass within a few hundred miles of the surface of the Earth on Friday, 13th April 2029. Toutatis is not an extinction-level event, but it’s pretty nasty all the same.
In the meantime, the world is stubbornly refusing to get hotter, cooling by almost a degree over the last ten years, and even the IPCC says this year, globally, will be “cooler than average”. Whatever “average” is.
So, the World is apparently going to hell in a handbasket, and we’re all going to die of heatstroke and dehydration. Or cold and flooding. Or something nasty, anyway.
The only problem is, someone forgot to tell the World.
Ah, there you are – long time no blog.
There are so many interesting parallels between the ID argument and the AGW argument that it’s hard to know where to start. What is perhaps the most interesting of all is that the majority of right-minded thinkers believe that ID is a load of balls, but the majority of right-minded thinkers believe that AGW is spot on. Weird, eh?
All right, so the majority in the ID case consists of 99.999% of people and the majority in the AGW case may only be 50.001%, but they’re both majorities (but not all majorities are equal, of course).
Yet more interesting still is the fact that “Expelled” and “An Inconvenient Truth” are both cinematic documentaries with about as much grounding in actual science as Lord of the Rings. That really *is* funny…