Thursday, August 13, 2009

IIDS: Intellectual Immune Deficiency Syndrome

We need a strategy for combating people that are willing to lie. It's as simple as that.

I'm working overnights this week, so I took the opportunity when I got home this morning to see my neighbor - the man that owns the Garage across the street. He's a decent man, a master mechanic. And he explained to me why the scientists are wrong about global warming and rising sea levels.

And here is the experiment. Take a plastic bottle, a 2 liter say, and fill it 75% up with water.
Freeze it.
Fill the remainder up with water and put the cap back on, sufficient to seal the bottle - let the ice melt.

The result is predictable of course - as the ice melts, the water it turns into takes less volume, and the bottle 'crumples' a bit. What's not predictable is that someone would use this to explain why melting ice from continental ice-shelves in Greenland would not raise the sea level.

If he was pulling my leg , well after extended conversation, it seems unlikely, but it's feasible (I was, for a short time, convinced Landover Baptist Church was real.). I don;t think he was, and I'm going on assuming for the nonce he was not.

Which means someone on talk radio came up with this obviously deceitful thing and said it. And for some reason his intellectual immune system did not reject it. Indeed, *I* was the one not getting the 'logic' of the argument.

If only I were smarter, and less gullible.

The fact that this is not the worst thing I've heard this week implies - There is something very wrong here.

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