November 21, 2009

THOUGHTS ON THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE

It appears to me that there's a good number of people who aren't funded by any one specific industry saying that "global warming" needs to be addressed by government and until recently there was not a lot of money to be made off of "solving global warming".  The interest for it grew out of scientific studies and started becoming an "environmental" meme.

Then in the 90s, "denying global warming" became a meme.  The arguments "against global warming" come from organizations set up by public relations agencies and research funded by businesses who would incur losses from government regulations.  And the research isn't so much hard scientific research as it is rhetorical research gathered to discredit "global warming" specifically so that it can't be used to justify regulation.  The arguments "against global warming" are always defensive and the only people that are passionate about it are paid by the industries that stand to be regulated, the Republican Party which is closely aligned with those interests, and dumb "Republicans" to whom it's simply an ideological left/liberal/Democrat vs. right/conservative/Republican issue.  There weren't people arguing against the idea of global warming that came out of the scientific community until it became a political issue and the argument against it doesn't seem to be so much a scientific argument that discredits it as much as a political argument against regulation.

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