If I offered you---

[palerider]

If I came to your house and offered you a beaker of iso amyl alcohol, 3-galloyl epigallocatchin phenyl ethanol, tannin, benzyl alcohol, caffeine, butanol, geraniol, quercetin, 3-galloyl epicatechin, hexanol, and inorganic salts, what would you do with it?

 

[n0spam4me]

Ok, I'll byte,
I'm not a chemist, so WHAT IS IT?

 

[palerider]

Ok, I'll byte,
I'm not a chemist, so WHAT IS IT?

It is tea.

The point is that few people would know what it is on paper because few have any education that would let them look at such a group of chemicals and determine its nature. Most chemists wouldn't know offhand what it is.

Words. especially scientific words, can be used in such a way as to make nearly anything seem dangerous and threatening, and if one can get people to percieve a thing as dangerous and threatening, it becomes easy to inflame them against both the thing that threatens them and whatever you can convince them is the origin of the thing that is threatening them.

I watched a video recently shot at a large climate change rally. The people shooting the video were circulating a petition calling for a ban on di-hydrogen monoxide. H2O. Water. The person circulating the petititon did not lie in any way and she was able to fill the petition with signatures. In fact, the organizer of the rally signed the petition to ban di-hydrogen monoxide.

The same thing is being done with regard to climate change. A few decades ago, the scare was global cooling. Then it seemed that the temp was rising so they switched to global warming. Since 1998, however, the global mean temperature has shown a slight decreasing trend and the media is such that one simply can't keep flip flopping back and forth between warming and cooling, so the term "climate change" was coined and it allows them to point and cry that the sky is falling, no matter which way the temperature moves.

The science doesn't support the claim but then few are equipped to sift through the sicence and make an informed call on whether or not the public is being lied to or at the very least, misinformed.

Here, have a gander at people who claim to be concerned, allowing themselves to be herded around like a flock of sheep simply because they are so concerned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw

Concern is a good thing and God knows, there are plenty of things in this world to be concerned about, but you have to use your brain.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

Haha, that's excellent.

 

[palerider]

Most people are egocentric - they are only concerned about things that affect them personally. Most will face the effects of global warming at the grocery store when they are fighting in the isles for the food on the shelves; others will be concerned about it when they see their beachfront property under water.

Have you ever taken time to actually examine what the effects of warming will be? Far from the food shortage senario of your fantasy, food production would skyrocket. Longer growing seasons, more rainfall, more arable land.

And with sea levels rising a few centemeters per year, we property owners really don't need to start sweating any time soon. We are still in the process of coming out of an ice age and until all ice is gone from the face of the earth, we will not be out of it. Look at your paleohistory. The average mean temperature of the earth over the past 500 million years or so has been so warm that no ice existed at all at one, or both, of the earth's poles.

By the way. Since 1998, the average global mean temperature has been decreasing. Perhaps you should stop the AGW fiction and change to AGC.

 

[palerider]

Nunquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit.
- Juvenal, xiv.321.

Nature says one thing, wisdom another? If you actually believed that, then you would not have the smallest worry about "global warming". Nature has spoken very clearly with regard to climate change. Here is what she has been saying for 500 milllion years. If you want to worry about something, worry because it is taking so long to get out of the present ice age.

Which part of what nature has been saying do you not understand?

Aestuat infelix angusto limite mundi.

By the way, latin doesn't impress me. I am impressed by sound and valid arguments.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

Nature has spoken very clearly with regard to climate change. Here is what she has been saying for 500 milllion years. If you want to worry about something, worry because it is taking so long to get out of the present ice age.

Exactly! Great post all around, palerider.

 

[Koios]

While I try to keep myself as informed as I possibly can... I wonder how many times I have "fallen victim" to this apparently quite common practice.


BTW: I think this is one of the best posts I have ever read on a forum… good job.