I was watching the FOX News show Outnumbered today which featured a mostly excellent segment on the climate criminals who are going around letting the air out of SUV tires. A little more than midway through the segment, the leftist panel member (Democrat strategist Jenna Arnold) tried to outflank the other four conservative members of the panel by proclaiming the “climate crisis” basically justified the attacks on SUV tires. The full segment is here, but the problematic clip is below. See if you can guess the problem.
The Problem: For one minute and twenty seconds, Arnold repeats “climate crisis” with essentially zero response or direct opposition from the four conservative panel members. Arnold even attacked Fox News for denying the alleged “climate crisis.”
The Solution: While it may very well be that the conservative panel members wanted to focus on the tire terrorism vs. the alleged “climate crisis,” the reality is that the assertion of a “climate crisis” — especially when repeated — needs to be challenged and corrected. There is no climate crisis — and that should be the minimum response. Jenna Arnold and everyone like her know nothing about climate except that they can repeatedly assert there is a “climate crisis” and know darn well that most conservatives will dodge the allegation and avoid the debate for a variety of (lame) reasons. If you’re going to be talking climate in public, you should know something about it and not be scared to challenge the other side. And they must be challenged. Otherwise, the audience may imagine the Jenna Arnolds of the world know what they are talking about. They don’t. They are just repeating well-honed and false talking points intended to help them prevail. If you need help on climate or have questions, you can always contact me here or DM me on Twitter, @JunkScience.
I have two questions for anyone claiming there is a climate crisis due to fossil fuel use:
1. Were there ice ages in the geologic past?
2. If yes to 1, how did they end?
who controls who the “conservatives” are on these panels? If it’s about “climate” where are the scientists?
This smells of “designed to fail”.
When they enter into debates on energy policy, conservative politicians need to have a bullet proof counter-argument to their opponents’ argument in mind. Today very few of them have one. Only one bullet proof argument is available to them but very few conservative politicians know about it. This argument is based upon the little known distinction between an “abstract” and a “concrete” event. In an application of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, our opponents mistake “abstract” events that lack positions in space and time for “concrete” events that have these positions but it is only “concrete” events that support regulation of Earth’s climate systems. Currently, neither the leadership of the Republican Party nor the rank and file are aware of the distinction between an “abstract” or a “concrete” event or its significance for our government’s energy policy. I’ve tried allerting conservative members of the U.S. Congeress to this distinction but none of them have ever returned my phone calls. Donald Trump is similarly unreachable.