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One thing that really drives me crazy about today's culture is how quick we are to take things in. Or, to put it bluntly, how gullible everyone has become.
Appealing to authority: a logical fallacy when someone believes something just because so-and-so says.
Example: "Leaves DO SO turn purple when they fall off; my big brother says so!"
Everywhere you look, people are shouting out theories and guesses and sometimes even just LIES, and their audience is taking it in like it's proven fact.
Um, sorry, but for something to be "proven fact", it has to be PROVEN first.
Think about all the stuff we Americans are taking in by the minute.
Tabloid gossip.
Global warming.Evolution.
There are more, but those are the ones that come to mind, and that I'm going to try to focus on.
First of all, I completely understand why tabloids print such awful stuff about celebrities, and I can also understand why people read them. No problem there. The problem comes when the general public BELIEVES all that junk just because a trashy magazine says so. Puh-leez. Sure it's fun to read, but don't you think the writers of those magazines are going to try to put the worst and juciest spin on things?
That's kind of a minor issue in my book, though. So people believe gossip, okay. It's not a matter of life or death, or even public intelligence. It's just silly and vaguely annoying, but that's about it.
Now come the big two:
Global warming and Evolution.
I already ranted about global warming, so I won't do it again, don't worry. I'm just going to say that to believe in global warming, you're forced to rely on the least accurate and smallest pieces of information. If you ask any earnest scientist, s/he will tell you that as much comotion as people are making about GW, it's not really a problem. The earth naturally runs in cycles like this. In twenty years, we'll probably be going through a "global cooling" scare again.
Yes, AGAIN. That already happened. And now we're into global warming.
And the disgusting thing is, WE STILL BELIEVE IT!
COME ON, people! Global cooling? Global warming? They're just big hoaxes designed to get us all stirred up.
Don't believe me, though. I don't want you to do that.
I want you to go do some research for yourself. I've done mine, you do yours. Don't take stuff from me or even big shot scientists without looking into it a little. A little healthy skepticism never hurt anyone. In fact, it's actually been known to help occasionally. Especially in times like these when selective use of evidence is booming.
Which brings me to my final section of this tirade: Evolution.
*sigh*
If you believe in Evolution (capital "E"), you are going to skip this section, so I'm pretty much wasting my breath. Still, I'm going to try to straighten this out even a little.
First, define terms. This is really important, especially in an Evolution debate, because there are two definitions to Evolution, and I believe in one of them.
evolution: the belief that things change slightly over time to adapt to their surroundings.
Evolution: the belief that life began as an unguided fluke, then species gradually changed and mutated into completely different species.
Take a wild guess which one I believe? :)
There's really so much I could say about Evolution that I could do a whole series on it.
Which is exactly what I'm going to do.
I'm going to close this post, and begin my series on Evolution.
I'm sorry if this wasn't much of a post. I feel like I wasted a good thought. Hope you don't feel that way.
Here's the main problem with the theory of Global Warming:
It doesn't exist.
Yeah, you read that right.
Now, before you roll your eyes, say "typical skeptic" and close this window, maybe you want to hear what I have to say?
I'm not an out-and-out skeptic. Not in the usual sense anyway. Yes, I am very skeptical of things until I have looked into them myself, but I DO look into them. I don't just dismiss every theory that sounds unpleasant; I do actually research them first.
I didn't actually challenge the theory of global warming until last semester. I just figured that it was true, or at least mostly true. Well, it's not quite.
Basically, the theory is that if the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were to increase too much, the earth would get too warm. But, as civilization has become more industrialized, people have been burning a lot more fuel than they used to. Before the Industrial Revolution, people burned wood and coal to heat houses and businesses, but that was about it. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, however, people are burning coal, wood, natural gas and gasoline in huge quantities to generate electrical power, run manufacturing machinery, etc. As a result, we have been putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the air than we used to.
This is where worries about global warming come from. Carbon dioxide is a participant in the greenhouse effect, which warms the planet. We also know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been rising steadily over the last 80 years or so. Well, increased carbon dioxide means an increased greenhouse effect, which will result in global warming right?Not quite.Although the fear of global warming IS based on scientific reasoning, it's actually more complex than most people think.
If you look at most scientific graphs, you can tell that over the past 80 years, the amount of carbon HAS risen, but then it dropped back down to an extremely low point, where it stays today. Every once in a while, the carbon dioxide level in the air seems to rise, but it always drops back down again. Thus, global warming isn't actually a problem at all. It's almost a hoax even.
Many people who talk about global warming discuss the fact that in their area of the world, the winters have been unusually warm over the past few years. They say global warming must be happening. This neglects the fact that the entire world is often quite different from one person's corner of it. While one area of the world might be experiencing unusually warm winters, other parts of the world might be having abnormally cool summers. As a result, the GLOBAL temperature does not change very much, despite what might be happening in one region of it.
It is also common to hear that certain large ice sheets that have been the same size for a long time are now starting to melt. This is then used to conclude that the earth ahs a whole is getting warmer.This is not sound scientific reasoning.
The fact that an ice sheet is melting is only evidence that *the part of the world that holds the ice sheet* is warming up. For example, a large ice sheet in the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen B ice shelf, has experienced a remarkable decline in size over the past few years. Some say that this is evidence for global warming. The problem is that the WEST Antarctic ice sheet has been THICKENING over the past few years. Thus, while the Antarctic Peninsula is getting warmer, the western part of the Antarctic is getting cooler. It turns out that temperature measurements of Antarctica indicate that overall, Antarctica has actually been cooling since the 1960's.
But, if you dig hard enough, you CAN find some evidence to show the earth is warming up as a whole. For example, land-based temperature measurements do show a slight warming trend, even over the past twenty years. The problem with these data, is that they ignore the 70% of the earth's surface, because they ignore what is happening over the OCEANS. When the entire globe is measured by satellites, no significant warming trend is seen.
Thus, to believe that global warming is occurring, you are forced to rely on the least reliable data and ignore the most reliable data. That's not good scientific practice.
Just something to think about. And please do THINK about it. Today's society takes things from the media without even looking into it.
Huh.
I just got an idea for another rant...
Until next time. And don't forget: don't just seize the day, seize the night as well.
(This information came primarily from "Exploring Creation with Physical Science" by Dr. Jay L. Wile.)
