Roger Simon runs into a Hollywood nitwit who believes in global warming because NASA says so.
Point 1: “NASA” doesn’t say so. One duplicitous ideologue masquerading as a climate scientist at one particular NASA center says so. That center had to confess error on his behalf (no doubt through clenched teeth).
Point 2: “NASA” has no opinion on anything. NASA is a government agency, with thousands of employees, of varying opinions. The previous NASA administrator, in fact, famously outraged the warm mongers with his own skepticism, but if any one person could have spoken for NASA at the time, it would have been Mike Griffin, not James Hansen.
Point 3: NASA has had many spectacular achievements in the past. It has also had many spectacular failures. To rely on it, as an agency, as a source of authority for something (particularly when there is no official agency position on it) is foolish. In fact, this false sense that people have in NASA as an authority has contributed greatly to the difficulty over the past decades to raise money for private ventures. This is because investors, when doing due diligence on an investment decisions, have often gone to someone at NASA who knows nothing about the venture, and relied on their foolish advice, for no other reason than they worked for NASA.
Anyway, this gets back to the foolishness of relying on people who claim to be scientists, instead of on science itself.
NASA is the only fed bureaucracy that has it’s own cable channel, NASA TV. I watch it regularly off Direct TV when it has something interesting like video from the ISS some historical film or a launch recap. It is also on the internet. A portion of the programming are childrens programs and some of these are about AGW and from what I’ve watched seem to be advocating the reality and urgency of action against AGW.
So the Hollywood nitwit gets his global warming views from children’s programs?
NASA, because it is credited with a significant achievement (Apollo) that has been so romanticized that it is Common Knowledge that all things NASA is the epitome of science.
Took me a long time to get over it, but when you hear “same thing NASA uses,” most people think “Best effing thing that ever was!”
That is the problem with it.
Because of apollo nasa has Absolute Moral Authority, as MoDo once said.
Appeal to authority. A common logical fallacy.
So the Hollywood nitwit gets his global warming views from children’s programs?
Hey, who would lie to children? The programs act like they’re imparting elementary knowledge from NASA scientists, the same way they talk about how the sun works and solar wind.
Seriously though, I expect the nitwit is a “James Hansen of NASA who was censored by Bush” fan and that the appeal to authority originally comes from left blogs/MSM resources.
I can’t speak to temperatures, but there has been a significant shift in precipitation in parts of the upper midwest/northern plains. One has to look no further than Devils Lake, ND which has been continuously rising (over 26 feet) due to increased precipitation since the early 1990s…