What “convinced” a majority of voters in the southern US in the 1960s that segregation was a bad idea?
I’m not sure, but certainly the important point is that the fact it was so hard to convince them means that it was a good idea all along!
Federalizing the National Guard.
Seriously, it was that a majority of the country as a whole was convinced that desegredation was a good idea. (At least that desegredation in the South was a good idea; they were a little more leery of busing in the 1970s but that’s another story).
And it wasn’t a good idea before that? It changed from being a bad idea to a good idea as soon as public opinion changed?
The fact is you can’t seem to convince enough people that your version of global warming should be their version of global warming. But don’t change 'cause I like you just the way you are. 
And when enough people eventually are convinced, what will that do to your position? Will you suddenly have been wrong all along and have to apologize? Or will you argue that the science somehow wasn’t true until a majority of voters were convinced by it, at which point it suddenly became true?
This is why your popularity-contest approach to scientific findings doesn’t logically work.
Y’know, just once I’d like to hear from a global-warming denier who is also unmistakably politically leftist. That would make me suspect that there might be something more to the denialism than RW tribal identity – which I have no reason to suspect at this point.
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Then this seems like a good time for NOAA to appear before a Congressional committee and explain, under oath, whether there was a recent decade long plateauing of the global temp. I believe they should take this opportunity to show the voters/public that they are truly open, honest, and transparent. It would help convince the voters/public to buy the rest of their global warming story. It would be a good start.
Or NOAA can refuse to appear, refuse to grant access to their taxpayer funded records, and show the voters/public that NOAA also believes that the voters/public are stupid and should believe just do what they’re told to believe.
And you wonder why your side can’t gather enough support to push your man-made-CO2-is-evil laws thru the legislatures. :smack:
If things were different, things would be different. Do you expect your strawman to keep you warm during this climate change called winter?
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Well said. For you. You’re the one who wants to change the status quo. Perhaps if you call your target audience stupid, or phenomenally stupid, they will be convinced to change their minds. :rolleyes:
It’s not a good comparison because civil rights was about values whereas global warming is about facts. What I’m saying is that if you expect the public to accept the sacrifices that combating global warming will require, you will have to either (a.) get the majority on board with the program; or (b.) set up a system where technocrats decide what’s to be done and the peasants are to shut up and do what they’re told.
I reiterate: less than half the country is convinced that the theory of evolution is true.
I’m sorry, but the “will of the people” sometimes just ain’t up to the task. And it’s really only gotten worse in recent years in the USA. FOX, Limbaugh, and co. have fostered an extremely toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and well-poisoning, leaving essentially no path for good ideas to get through.
The fact that the majority is not always right. In this case, they are horribly, horribly wrong. Well, in the USA at least.
…But I didn’t call my target audience stupid.
Well, okay, I did:
But that’s under the assumption that you’re doing something very, very stupid.
But apparently you didn’t read the post you responded to. The whole point is that I don’t care about some hypothetical group of voters. When I post here, I’m talking to you. Put aside all those idiots. What do you think? Why do you think it? I can’t convince some random hypothetical voter. I can’t talk to said hypothetical voter. I can talk to you.
How does one “convince” people who are as impervious to facts as doorhinge? A lot of Americans are not “convinced” that evolution is a fact. At least in that case the consequence of refusing to recognize facts are not as immediately detrimental as global climate change is likely to be.
No ‘electrons carry electricity’ zealot has managed to convince me that these ‘electrons’, whatever they are, do anything of the sort. I mean, these ‘electrons’ are supposed to exist everywhere, right? If that’s the case, how come you have to flip a switch to get light? Shouldn’t they just be lit up all the time? On the other hand, how come you can get light from a fire? There’s no electricity involved at all, so what’s up with that? I think it’s all just a plot by the power companies to convince us we need to buy ‘electrons’ from them.
A lot of these zealots, when I mention my beliefs, call me stupid, or phenomenally stupid. I don’t know why they think that insults will change my mind.
The fact that there was a recent decade-long plateau in global surface temperature is widely recognized, and NOAA has openly, honestly and transparently admitted it. Heck, you can read about it on their own website.
This is in no way inconsistent with climate science’s findings of a long-term increasing trend in global surface temperature. As the same article points out,
What is currently being explored, as a recent NOAA study reports, is whether and to what extent the data during the “plateau” period may in fact indicate that there was continued warming over that period rather than no net warming at all. But all of that data and research is available in published articles, many of which are cited in my link. So I’m not seeing why you think that NOAA should appear before a Congressional committee and have their records subpoenaed.
It sounds like the typical liars-and-deniers tactic of responding to scientific results you don’t like with gratuitous allegations of unspecified misconduct and demands for trial. You don’t actually have any rational grounds for thinking that NOAA has done anything wrong: you just figure that if you throw enough mud at them, some of it is bound to stick to them, in the minds of the public.
Like I said, I don’t wonder about that at all: it’s because the liars-and-deniers side is going flat out in their efforts to dishonestly undercut that support and flagrantly misrepresent the science.
Given the power and influence of many of those on the liars-and-deniers side, I’m rather surprised that there’s even as much public awareness of the scientific reality as there is.
In other words, your strategy is to hope that the facts of climate science won’t become widely accepted until after you’re safely dead and can no longer be embarrassed by your long campaign of dishonest manipulation to deny and misrepresent the science.
Well, I have to give you credit for doing your best to make that happen, at least.
The fact that you don’t even understand the difference between annual seasonal temperature variation and the long-term climate effects of anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere is completely consistent with the level of scientific ignorance you’ve been demonstrating throughout this thread.
Then let me reiterate: what determines whose decisions get made into public policy? Who gets to decide which group will be thus empowered? The ugly truth is that to an extent everything is political, because everything is ultimately done by people- either because of their will or in spite of it. The years of dancing around trying to set climate protocols have had minimal results precisely because the signatories have to maintain the political power to have a say about anything. Even dictators have to consider whether an course of action is going to lead to dissent or not, or else end up like Caesar having the Praetorian Guard turn against him.
It’s like the old idea of the Philosopher Kings: have the wise people who know what’s good and right rule; except it would require absolute power at a level Stalin or Mao could only have wet dreams about.
The ironic thing is that the evidence that is convincing to scientists is not the same as what convinces the public. Scientists look at long term trends and analysis of complex data, while the public is mainly influenced by their immediate perception.
Belief by the general public in global warming goes up significantly after extreme weather events. While extreme weather events are expected to increase in frequency in a warmer world, individual ones aren’t direct evidence of climate change.
The El Nino event now in progress is expected to be one of the most severe ever recorded. Torrential rains in California and other effects are likely. Next year I suspect that public acceptance of global climate change will again go up, but for the wrong reasons.
This does not make sense as the dictators of several Arab nations found, not looking at the problem can lead indeed to dictators being Arrested, shot or almost toppled when droughts become more intense.
I do think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is right, not looking at science does lead nations into losing their wealth, for some dictators it will in the short run; for rich nations it will be a slow process, but as Tyson said “nobody wants to become poor”. Eventually even the most stubborn deniers will see that a change is needed, as he said also “I don’t know when it will happen” for many republicans in power, but it will eventually.
Doorhinge isn’t even correct about his centerpiece argument: Americans Have Never Been So Sure About Climate Change—Even Republicans.
In a nutshell, 3/4 of the public now accepts the scientific consensus on climate change. I wonder if dimwit will continue repeating his imaginary claims?