27th November 2009, 01:29 PM
DiggerMoose Wrote:The Green movement may not have as much to gain as the oil lobby et al but it still has more than enough to gain to serve as a motivating force to distort the evidence. Funding for courses and academic posts,public support, charity work and donations etc (several of my friends work for charities, the pay and conditions are good and are certainly better than in archaeology).
Humankind does affect its environment and the climate but to portray us as exclusively responsible for climate change is wrong. A falsehood told by the side which claims to hold the moral highground is just as wrong as a falsehood told by the oil lobby or other commercial interests, arguably more so.
Hmmm, I'm not sure that really makes a lot of sense. Are you suggesting that people in the 'Green movement' spend their careers lying so that they might get another year's funding? To say the Green movement have enough to gain from distorting evidence is really quite insulting - I hope you don't say that to your friends who work in this area.
The oil industry, by contrast, would surely stand to lose an enormous amount more if we all stopped using petrol and so have more to gain by spending resources promoting itself and discrediting the counter evidence. The Green movement also probably presents a lot more of its evidence openly in areas where it can be debated, hence leaving itself open to criticism. What do its opponents do behind the scenes?
I don't think that humans are necessarily solely responsible for climate change, and I'm not totally convinced that the current bout of climate change is necessarily any different to what has gone on before, but it would seem prudent to do something about it even if there is the slightest likelihood that it is our fault. There is a tiny likelihood of the planet being hit by a comet but resources are still spent keeping an eye on whether any are coming near us or not (as far as I know). The other difference is that cow's don't realise that their farts contribute to global warming; fire doesn't know that burning a huge forest down upsets the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are aware that we have a detrimental effect on the environment, and to claim it is a Greenwash is the equivalent of putting your head in the sand.