Monday, December 19, 2005

Oh Yeah..What A Rush
That reflexive anthro-apologist Rush Limbaugh is again claiming madness about humankind's footprint upon the planet.

His climatology credentials are par excellence. As best as I can tell, he has no academic climatic credentials - having lasted but a year in college - and no experiential substance to back up his claims.

I'd say that he just 'makes shit up,' - and yes, he does make a self-referential plug of his own website's 'essential stack of stuff'(subscription required) - but I do not know that this is a fact. One can only imagine the voluminous material of peer-reviewed material refuting ecosystem change walled up in this haven for the latest in scientific debate.(heavy sarcasm)

Media Matters has Rush's latest.

I hesitate to call them lies, as I do not honestly know if Mr. Limbaugh possesses the acumen to differentiate between established fact and fantasy. His record is this area isn't very good.

Getting to the point, Rush claimed that, "[t]here is no evidence that we could destroy ecosystems."

While Media Matters does a good job of dispelling this obvious myth, the BBC's Guide to global environmental environmental issues is chock full of the good stuff.

Two other good sources are Bill Moyers' excellent Earth On Edge series and the World Resources Institute's terrific EarthTrends site. These last two sources are an ecosystem by ecosystem break down as to how far things are already impacted by human activity, as well as projections of future changes.

I don't think that I need to go into the Pleistocene-Holocene extinction event which is almost universally agreed to as being caused by human effect..and is accelerating even now.

A quick primer.

I would have never known about Limbaugh's latest if it was not for the tireless crew at Media Matters. I subscribed to their email updates, and it allows me a glimpse into the 'Right' mind that I would otherwise miss.

As I have stated many times before, I am not an expert on anything but some obscure mathematics, and semiconductor gate process modification.

I'm not a climatologist, but I understand much of the mathematics behind the modeling, and am open to new interpretations of data sets. Mr. Limbaugh cannot alter his positions even when confronted with evidences to the contrary.

His rigidity in thinking is a concern for us all, as Mr. Limbaugh is unfortunately, a primary 'news source' for millions of Americans.

Rush is Wrong.

Hey, look at that. I made an entire post about Limbaugh without mentioning midnight Denny's Oxy runs.

Damn!

Well, almost.

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