Over on Space Science, I mentioned James Hansen as part of the discussion in this thread. In a response, I said this:

“Now what happens? Does it maybe involve vast amounts of wealth and power accrued to the True Gods, who for some reason are never considered ‘greedy?’”

The link was to a news article on James Hansen, a major leader and opinion-maker in the global warming movement, whose name ranks up there with Al Gore’s in public exposure.

If I link to something, it’s because it’s an important part of my point.

My point in that thread was that the global warming issue was more about power and wealth transfer to centralized authorities than it was about climate. I used a movement leader, Hansen, to nail this point down.

In a new thread, the discussion proceeded. I simply assumed everyone was up to speed on my argument.

It became obvious as the discussion proceeded that not only had the first link remained untouched, but that people still had no idea who James Hansen was in the first place. Keep in mind the participants were mostly the same people on both threads.

To claim to be able to seriously discuss the global warming controversy and have no idea who Hansen is, is like someone pontificating on the chances of their favorite football team and having no clue who the quarterback is.

Whatever. Nobody knows everything, but an active intellect faced with a hole in their knowledge will usually try to fill it. At least that’s how I’ve always thought about it. A person sitting in front of a computer, which by definition includes everyone here during an active back-and-forth, has no excuse for ignorance in this day and age. If somebody throws me an information curve ball in a post (not that rare), or a new link, I spend time researching it before I do a response. This seems reasonable to me.

You look it up, incorporate the new information, and see if anything changes.

If I sound like I know what I’m talking about when I come back to the discussion, it’s not arrogance or genius, it’s just damn spadework.

I finally said to ER on the thread: “You never actually looked at the Hansen link, did you?”

ER cames back this morning with this:

I didn’t have to. He contributed no data to my argument, his opinions did not influence my analysis, my reasoning was not guided by his in any way. Until just a few weeks ago, I had no clue who he was, and until today, I knew little about him. He was simply a distraction, your attempt to divert the dialogue into a direction where you felt more comfortable. Just because he offends you does not mean I am under any obligation to defend him.

However, I just did look him up, a few minutes ago, and as far as I can tell from a quick scan of his Wiki bio, his scientific credentials are impeccable (he got the atmosphere of Venus issue right, didn’t he?), its only his politics that you seem to find objectionable. But TB, you find just about everybody’s politics objectionable.

The man is an astronomer. I must grudgingly concede a bit of personal bias there. Astronomers do tend to have a solid grasp on the nature of data, an understanding of the process of observation, and the role the observer plays in it. I must confess I am inclined to weigh their opinions a bit heavier than I would, say, some public relations engineer on the payroll of the American Petroleum Institute.

Keep in mind that I actually, in a comment header, told Alcaray who Hansen was the day before (he didn’t have a comment on the first thread and might not have seen the link). That comment was right below this.

ER still doesn’t really know who Hansen is, and still doesn’t care. I’d give odds that he still hasn’t read the article on Hansen’s political “prescription” for global warming or he couldn’t possibly have written the above response. What the hell does his being an astronomer have to do with anything at all?

My point (and my use of James Hansen, leader of the movement, to prove it) was lost in the noise for him a long time ago.

I don’t want to hear any argument, I don’t want to see your evidence, I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know. It doesn’t make any difference to what I believe.

This is how a religious fanatic thinks. One who votes.

I used to think knowledge was power. It’s becoming frighteningly clear that in a democracy with universal suffrage, stupidity and ignorance are power. It’s not surprising that many of our leaders are trying to set our society up to encourage this.

For the record, here’s the article link on Hansen, and a further link to his paper on global warming and how we should rebuild society.

No, I don’t expect even reasonable people to plow through that whole paper. I just had the link handy to back up my numbers on Hansen’s carbon tax proposals: $15 a ton the first year, going up by $10 a ton every year thereafter.

For the record, the U.S. pumps out 5,492,170,000 tons a year. In the first year, the tax would be “only” $82.4 billion. By the tenth year, the tax would be $577 billion a year, with a total of $3.3 trillion dollars having flowed over that decade to…what? Who? And that’s just the U.S. China’s CO2 output is bigger than ours, and their entire GDP is about $7.3 trillion.

That’s Hansen’s idea of how to fix things. In his mind, the fix is easy. Just stop using carbon fuels.