Monday, February 20, 2017

Cynthia Barnett likes "post-truth" when it suits her political agenda

I'm sure Cynthia Barnett is a nice person. And I'm sure she means well and is concerned about our environment, as we all should be. But writing in this Sunday's Perspective section of the Tampa Bay Times, she employs some logical legerdemain and other trickeries to push her climate scientology and politics.

Ms. Barnett opens up her article with a brief history of the mass migration west of American settlers and the disaster of the Dust Bowl era. She's entirely right about this mess -- there was a period of wildly above normal rains in a typically arid part of this country that caused it to become temptingly lush. But after farmers and families moved everything they had to the region, the dry years returned and everything went to hell.

And the Federal Government and newspapers of the day -- late 1800's to early 1900's, with a vested interest in expanding the railroads and supporting the westward growth of the nation did their best "nothing to see here, move along" routine. Something we've seen throughout history in the world, when citizens of any nation or state have no access to news except that which is provided for them by agenda controlled entities.

Ms. Barnett naturally uses this scenario to try and stoke fears over the confirmation of Rex Tillerson (former Exxon/Mobil CEO) as Secretary of State and Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA as both of these men have been public in their skepticism of the notion of man-caused climate change.

Ms. Barnett makes a deliberate point of noting that the Oxford English Dictionary declared that the word "post-truth" was its word of the year. Defining it as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

Interesting that she should make such a big point about that since Ms. Barnett immediately afterwards shows her true political agenda by declaring that 2016 was the hottest year on record, the third consecutive record-breaking year.

As anyone with a computer and internet access can find for themselves, these so-called record breaking temperatures are increases of .01 and .02 degrees Centigrade. Amounts that are so tiny, they cannot actually be determined with any measure of accuracy as the plus/minus or margin of error in these measurements is one tenth of a degree. And as I have noted many times in the past, these measurements are from wildly inaccurate land based measurement systems with corrupted software, not remote satellite sensors which are considered the more accurate method and which show no warming for nearly two decades now.

But rolling with her own "post-truthiness" Ms. Barnett continues with provable falsehoods about rising ocean levels, rising ocean temperatures and rising sea acidity. She desperately implores readers of her article to avoid Breitbart News in the US and the Daily Mail in Britain as she claims they spread science denial and put the most vulnerable at risk. And in this shows that she is just another of the lefty masses who cannot accept that Hillary lost the election.

She is right about one thing though -- by railing against government controlled media, or in fact any agenda controlled media, she makes the point I've been making all along about the climate change hysteria. Anyone can find the truth about global warming, droughts, floods, or any extreme weather event and whether they are increasing or decreasing or just going along as they have for millennia by digging out the data for yourself. We literally have more data/knowledge at our fingertips than any time in human existence.

Don't take Ms. Barnett's word for anything. She has a political agenda. Heck, don't take my word for it either. Go look for yourself. But pay attention to who you're getting your facts from, they often have agendas too. You have to be a discerning consumer of information these days.

And one last thing -- Ms. Barnett is not a scientist. She's a journalist with a degree in journalism not science. She may be well intentioned, but like those she lashes out at in her article, she has an agenda to push and she doesn't hesitate to spread non-truths to drive that agenda along.

Btw, just in case Ms. Barnett happens across this post, here's a little happy place she can go to think about what might have been.

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