Connecting the dots

Connecting the dots between the anti-AGW crowd and the anti-science/pro-smoking crowd is easy. Convincing people that the conspiracy ISN’T in trying to convince people to buy your book or accept AGW dogmatically, but rather in spreading FUD about science, is apparently hard.

Humans are ill-equipped to handle long-term crises, and we naturally tend to blame the messenger or, alternately, accuse them of having something to gain for it. Meanwhile, the people who ARE gaining something off of sticking with the “tried and true” methods (which happen to be slowly killing us, just like the tobacco companies were back in the day / still are now), are succeeding at the framing battle merely by spreading doubt about the science itself — which is unequivocally pointing at anthropogenic causes for global warming.

Don’t get me wrong. In the case of smoking, it’s a personal decision to risk lung cancer for a few moments of head-spin from nicotine. Except where it’s not — where second-hand smoke is a risk to others, and governments throughout Canada are rightly banning smoking in public places. In this case, companies are making a bundle off of oil (and the governmental oil subsidies), at the expense of the entire globe’s biosphere. We all benefit from stopping this madness, this slow genocide. Not only would getting off of fossil fuels dampen the frequency of resource-wars like the ones in the Middle East presently, but we’d have cleaner air and fewer wild swings in our weather patterns to boot.

And on the flip side, the argument is reduced to, “what if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

Hat tip to Atheist Media and DeSmogBlog’s Peter Sinclair.

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Connecting the dots
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