Letter: Resident’s letters were misleading to the public (Printed Feb. 8, 2008)
Editor:
Jeff Cole’s recent letters about global warming provide a useful lesson on how to mislead people by filtering information. If you wear the right blinders, you can convince yourself of just about anything. And you can convince other people, too, if they don’t know any better. Let’s see how he does it, in the hope that we’ll be less likely to get hoodwinked by these tactics.
Lesson 1: Quote people out of context. You can make someone look downright evil this way, as long as your audience doesn’t bother to look up the quote themselves. As an exercise for the reader, think about how you could make me look evil by quoting this letter.
Lesson 2: Claim to have lots of additional information, but don’t tell people where to find it. I call this the McCarthy’s List Tactic. Unfortunately for Cole, it’s pretty easy to find information nowadays, and quite a bit of it contradicts Cole’s claims. For example, if you go to wikipedia.org, type “global warming”, and then follow the references to various peer-reviewed journals, you’ll quickly see quantitative evidence of human-induced global warming. However, you won’t find Cole’s secret stash of information.
Lesson 3: Cherry-pick information. For example, Cole correctly points out that Greenland and Europe experienced the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and he claims that the same was true of the whole planet. Actually, Antarctica was colder during both periods (see Quaternary Research, November 2002), and the Little Ice Age probably didn’t happen everywhere at the same time. In other words, the global mean temperature didn’t vary as much as you would think. In fact, the Earth is warmer now than it was during the Medieval Warm Period. You can find lots of interesting information about this if you go to noaa.gov and search for “paleo.”
Lesson 4: Provide bogus or outdated information. Find information that supports your point of view, then repeat it without checking its veracity. For example, Cole claims that the rates of glacial retreat and sea level rise have been constant for two hundred years. That’s what scientists believed until a few years ago, but recent data suggest that sea level has been rising much faster in the past fifteen years than it did previously. The disappearance of ice is even more dramatic.
Cole also claims that “The Earth has been much warmer during the last 3,000 years, and beyond...” That may have actually been true fifteen years ago, but not anymore. According to www.noaa.gov, “The recent record warm temperatures in the last 15 years are indeed the warmest temperatures the Earth has seen in at least the last 1000 years, and possibly in the last 2000 years.” Maybe Cole knows about a warm spike 3,000 years ago.
Lesson 5: Find some experts who agree with you, and ignore the rest. Cole names two “esteemed scientific experts” who share his view, despite the fact that at least 99% of scientists disagree with him. To get an idea of what the scientific consensus is, see the Royal Society’s Web site, which has links to joint international statements on the issue.
Jason Wise
Kennebunk
Jeff Cole’s recent letters about global warming provide a useful lesson on how to mislead people by filtering information. If you wear the right blinders, you can convince yourself of just about anything. And you can convince other people, too, if they don’t know any better. Let’s see how he does it, in the hope that we’ll be less likely to get hoodwinked by these tactics.
Lesson 1: Quote people out of context. You can make someone look downright evil this way, as long as your audience doesn’t bother to look up the quote themselves. As an exercise for the reader, think about how you could make me look evil by quoting this letter.
Lesson 2: Claim to have lots of additional information, but don’t tell people where to find it. I call this the McCarthy’s List Tactic. Unfortunately for Cole, it’s pretty easy to find information nowadays, and quite a bit of it contradicts Cole’s claims. For example, if you go to wikipedia.org, type “global warming”, and then follow the references to various peer-reviewed journals, you’ll quickly see quantitative evidence of human-induced global warming. However, you won’t find Cole’s secret stash of information.
Lesson 3: Cherry-pick information. For example, Cole correctly points out that Greenland and Europe experienced the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and he claims that the same was true of the whole planet. Actually, Antarctica was colder during both periods (see Quaternary Research, November 2002), and the Little Ice Age probably didn’t happen everywhere at the same time. In other words, the global mean temperature didn’t vary as much as you would think. In fact, the Earth is warmer now than it was during the Medieval Warm Period. You can find lots of interesting information about this if you go to noaa.gov and search for “paleo.”
Lesson 4: Provide bogus or outdated information. Find information that supports your point of view, then repeat it without checking its veracity. For example, Cole claims that the rates of glacial retreat and sea level rise have been constant for two hundred years. That’s what scientists believed until a few years ago, but recent data suggest that sea level has been rising much faster in the past fifteen years than it did previously. The disappearance of ice is even more dramatic.
Cole also claims that “The Earth has been much warmer during the last 3,000 years, and beyond...” That may have actually been true fifteen years ago, but not anymore. According to www.noaa.gov, “The recent record warm temperatures in the last 15 years are indeed the warmest temperatures the Earth has seen in at least the last 1000 years, and possibly in the last 2000 years.” Maybe Cole knows about a warm spike 3,000 years ago.
Lesson 5: Find some experts who agree with you, and ignore the rest. Cole names two “esteemed scientific experts” who share his view, despite the fact that at least 99% of scientists disagree with him. To get an idea of what the scientific consensus is, see the Royal Society’s Web site, which has links to joint international statements on the issue.
Jason Wise
Kennebunk
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