Opinions vs. Facts – How Far off Opinions can get us.

If you are a reader of mine or visiting for the first time, it will not take long for you to pick up on how opposed I am to the teaching of opinions in the education system as opposed to keeping it to the facts. My primary concern is the teaching opinions removes from the children the reasoning skills to differentiate facts from useless information. This shows up especially in mathematics in the form of decreased ability to calculate story problems. Naturally that bleeds over into math dependent fields such as the hard sciences, engineering, and most of the technology sector.

But instead of just writing about opinions vs. facts, it would be best if I showed a very common example of how opinions have overridden what the facts are on a neutral topic. Well, neutral to some while others are passionate.

The topic of choice is Global Warming. In one corner we have the United Nations and Al Gore crying up a storm about how CO2 is destroying our environment and extraordinary procedures need to be adopted globally to confront this issue with ‘massive scientific consensus.’ That would be the example of listening to opinions. Facts are a different matter. In order to make major assertions, there better be undeniable verifiable proof. So what proof do they have? A nice yarn spun by Al Gore and a small number of scientists or writers who were willing to create results for the right price. What’s the problem with it? Well, there are a lot of problems.

• Climate is an average of weather. Weather is restricted to local or regional effects. To prove there even is a global climate orthogonalities of the Earth have to be taken into account with the data. Too bad the data favors climate and weather is restricted to local or regional effects.
• CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.
• You have to discount geologic effects such as magma coming near to the surface and causing melting to occur.
• You have to discount solar effects. Considering the Mars polar caps are melting as well, that might be a challenge.
• The scientists disagree. Science depends on the realm of proof not opinion.

The last one needs the most support. So how about a letter sent to the UN on December 13, 2007 with 100 signatories of notable scientists? Not enough yet? Okay, get ready for the link fest because here it comes. How about a nice report? Are one hundred scientists not enough? How about 2 more, or another 35, another 105 along with their position statement, another 500, let’s up it to 4000 more and top it off with 19,000 more scientists. Do you want the full list? Here it is.

Also, you really have to check the sources of who is talking. Would Al Gore stand to profit at all from this and is possibly playing us for a fool for his pocketbook? Oh and how many scientists does Al have in his corner for his consensus? 51

If you want to go by facts, Global Warming is a non to mild issue. If you want to go by sensationalism and blown up opinions, then tell your grandma to put down that cigar.

Please Grandma, lose the cigar for the sake of the world. Or maybe just for the sake of her teeth would be good enough.